


Numb

by TracingHerWay



Category: The Handmaid's Tale (TV), The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Heavy Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Gilead, Reunions, Trauma, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-07-12 07:34:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19942507
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TracingHerWay/pseuds/TracingHerWay
Summary: Another take on a world after Gilead. Canon up to 3x06, then diverges.June, now reunited with Luke, Hannah and Holly, struggles with Nick’s past.---Gilead is done with. Over.“Nicholas Blaine, a former member of the so-called Sons of Jacob and Commander of Gilead, has today been pardoned for his role in the regime.”“He was released from prison this afternoon.”*** Chapter 8 added 23rd October. STORY COMPLETE. ***





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is my attempt to fill the Nick-and-June-shaped void in my life that Season 3 has created.

Gilead is done with. Over.

In the heart of it, the rotten core, they made us believe it was impenetrable. The truth was, only the northeastern states were secure. The northwestern and southeastern regions were already in conflict - war zones - and to the west lay only the toxic wasteland of the Colonies. That was liberated quickly.

There is still some fighting going on around Washington, but it’s the end. We all know it. We believe it.

I’m listening to the TV. I don’t look up much from my place on the floor with Holly. I don’t want to see. I just listen to the newsreader.

_“Nicholas Blaine, a former member of the so-called Sons of Jacob and Commander of Gilead, has today been pardoned for his role in the regime.”_

I already knew this was happening today. The US embassy called me this morning to let me know.

Luke looks up at me from his seat on the couch, his expression loaded. I wouldn’t call the look he gives me judgement. It’s more subtle than that. But it’s something like it.

_”The pardon was issued as government officials today confirmed that Blaine was instrumental in bringing about the liberation of Chicago, working with the United States government as a double agent. This event is seen by many to have marked the start of Gilead’s collapse in the North, beginning the advance of the Allies south through the state of Illinois, and the wider region._

_“He was released from prison this afternoon._

_“Blaine is also the biological father of Holly Osborne, previously known as Nichole, the baby at the centre of Fred and Serena Joy Waterford’s televised propaganda campaign last year, although his relationship with his daughter, and her mother, June Osborne, is not known at this time. Mrs Osborne was not present at the prison for his release today.”_

Not known at this time. That about sums it up.

I haven’t seen Nick in a year. Not since that night in the garden at the Winslows’ house in DC. It feels like a lifetime ago. In many ways, it is. He’s been in prison for six months. He was arrested as soon as the US troops flooded their way in to Chicago. I’m told they had to keep his involvement in the Resistance quiet at first, until it was all over, to protect the members of Mayday in other regions still under Gilead’s control. So he was treated like all of the other Commanders from Chicago; locked up. But when he wasn’t put on trial like the rest of them, that’s when the press started murmuring that he had been working undercover. There was a lot of bureaucracy to get him out. A lot of people didn’t want him released. Said he was still guilty, no matter what he’d done for Chicago.

And they were right.

I think I’m meant to be happy that he was working with the US government. Proud, right? The truth is, it isn’t enough. I am numb. Ever since I learned that he was a soldier in the Crusade, a member of the Sons of Jacob, I haven’t known what to feel. I’ve swallowed it all down. With him being gone, it’s just been easier that way.

But now he’s out.

His photo on the TV is alien to me, that’s why I don’t look up. We exchanged a few letters, when I first got to Canada. Short, nothing major. Factual. I told him that I was safe, that Hannah was safe (she was freed days before me), that we were with Luke. That I’d made it back to Holly.

I sent him a picture of her, from her first birthday. I thought I at least owed him that, for what he had done.

He didn’t reply to that letter.

—

“You gonna go and see him?” Luke asks, later, while we’re prepping dinner. It’s more of a statement than a question. He knows the answer. It’s not like he would expect me never to contact Nick again. Even though, secretly, that may be exactly what he wants.

Luke and I haven’t been the same since I got back. We’ve tried; we’ve gone through the motions. For Hannah, more than anyone else. But it’s just kind of empty now. An act. Something has broken that we can’t repair. I still love him, of course, and I’m glad to be with him now. I don’t want to be alone. Seeing him again was the biggest relief of my life. I never thought I would. I’m grateful to him for so many things. For being a friend to Moira when she got out. For getting the letters out. For raising Holly when I (we) couldn’t.

But I don’t think he’s gotten over what I said in that cassette tape. I don’t regret sending it, for telling him it was ok to move on if that’s what he wanted. I think actually, that hurt him more than what I said about Nick. The idea that I thought he could have moved on.

He doesn’t resent me for it. He’s trying to make it work between us, because that’s what he wants. But it has changed things.

I’m not the same. He wants to go back, but we can’t. I don’t want to put myself back where I was, in a world before. A world that allowed Gilead to happen. Because I was blind. We all were.

I don’t want to hurt Luke.

Too late. I’ve hurt him already.

What I mean is: I don’t want to hurt him again.

—

In the end, I arrange a meeting through the embassy.

Nick was imprisoned near Detroit, in Michigan, near the border with Canada. But they tell me he’s moving to Toronto. _Coincidence, or what?_

Because his release has been controversial, they are helping him… to an extent. Protecting him. Finding him accommodation, under the radar of the press. Getting him settled.

So I wait a couple of weeks.

And then, in no time at all, I’m sitting in the waiting room, at the law offices in Little America, waiting to see the father of my child—this man who is a stranger to me now.

I don’t bring Holly. Not yet. Luke stays home with her and Hannah.

I’m lost in my thoughts when a law officer comes round the corner and clocks me.

“Mrs Osborne?”

“Yes, hi…”

“This way please.”

I stand up too fast. I’m lightheaded enough already. She leads me down a hallway.

“Are you ok?” she says.

_No._

“Yes.”

She slows to a stop.

“Mr Blaine is through there,” she states, pointing to a closed door. “Do you want me to come in with you?”

“No, thank you.”

She smiles kindly, nods, and walks away.

I feel sick.

I take a deep breath, steeling myself. I’m not ready, I’ll never be ready, but there’s nothing for it. I grip the door handle and push.

He’s standing with his back to me, facing the window.

Resting his hands on a chair, head down.

As he hears the door open, he straightens up and turns, and, after all this time, _he’s right there_.

“June.”

And I can’t breathe.

I’m a mess of clichés. I have butterflies; my heart is pounding in my throat.

He takes a couple of slow steps towards me, his face unreadable, but when I don’t move, he stops.

There’s another version of this: one where we crash into each other’s arms, forget about the world, hold each other, kiss, both finally free of the chains that kept us apart for so long. Part of me wants to wrap my arms around him, bury my face in the crook of his neck and breathe him in. That’s what I would have done, before _._ I don’t remember exactly how he smells; I just remember how it used to feel like home.

I think of the last time I saw him. How we fell into that embrace, in the snow.

But all of that is not possible anymore. That was before.

How do you greet someone, when you love and hate them in equal measure?

What do you say when you don’t know who the man you fell in love with is? When you don’t know whether you loved him, or just the idea of who you thought he was; what he let you believe? That he was a good man? When, really, he was just a man? As imperfect as the rest of us? Or worse? It feels like, in Gilead, he only showed me the parts of himself that he wanted me to see. He left out anything that showed him in a bad light. That might cause me to question him.

I’d forgotten the sound of my name on his lips, though; that low, gentle whisper. He says it and the last three years melt away. We’re back in his apartment, above the garage. Meeting for the first time. He’s holding me. His arms around me.

_It’s nice to meet you, June._

I was a fool to think I was over this.

If you don’t tell someone the truth, if you don’t tell them anything at all, is that still a lie? Or is it just nothing? Emptiness?

How can I still love this man, when I know now what he did? Because of him and hundreds of men like him, my daughter was taken away from me. Luke was almost killed. It’s not like it was all his doing, I know that, but he was part of it. Complicit. Whoever he is now, however he might have changed since then, his past is not something I’m sure I can ever forgive.

I’m so angry.

Or is what they said about him wrong? Are they the liars? Did I let them poison me against him?

_You get in bed with the government, it’s not so easy to get out._

Was he just as trapped as the rest of us? Did they lie to him too?

That’s what I want to believe.

“Hi.”

—

I ask him how he is. Fine, he says.

I’m good too, I say.

Bullshit.

“How was prison?”

“Which one?” he asks. He means Gilead too. And he’s right. The truth is, we were all in prison for five years.

We are guarded. He knows we can’t be the same now as we were before. We’ve both put up walls.

We talk about nothing; nothing that matters.

There’s a whole lot of things I wish I could verbalise, but I don’t. I had tried to imagine what I’d say to him when I saw him again, but nothing came out right in my head. I’m not ready to talk yet. I don’t know how to explain to him how I feel. Because I don’t know myself. I don’t know what to ask him, because a part of me still doesn’t want to know. Maybe that’s why I never pressed him before.

There’s only one thing I _can_ bear to ask him right now.

“Do you want to see her? Holly?”

I think that actually surprises him. A flicker of some unspoken thought crosses his face. 

I don’t know what he expected. That I’d refuse to let him see her? _Should I?_

“What about Luke?” he replies.

—

As much as I love Luke, as much as he loves Holly, that wasn’t his decision to make.

So Nick agreed to come and see Holly. We exchanged details before we parted.

It’s happening today. Luke’s going to be here too.

Moira has come round to take Hannah out before Nick arrives. I don’t know exactly what’s it’s going to be like and I don’t want anything to upset her.

Hannah knows, of course, that Luke is not Holly’s father; she saw me pregnant in Gilead after all. But we haven’t told her about what’s happening today. I don’t want to confuse her until we know how this dynamic is going to work. She’s doing better these days, but she still gets unsettled really easily.

“Thanks for taking her,” I say to Moira, packing some snacks in to Hannah’s backpack.

“Any excuse to spend some time with my favourite girl,” Moira smiles, and ruffles Hannah’s hair as we walk towards the door.

“Can we get some pancakes?” Hannah says. I smile to myself. If she’s talking about food, then she’s probably ok.

At least that’s one less thing to worry about. For today anyway.

“Sure,” Moira laughs.

I kneel down and squeeze her.

“Bye, Hannah Banana.”

She doesn’t know how much I need a hug right now, but she squeezes back just the same, and it gives me strength.

I stand back up and grab her coat.

Moira glances back at Luke through the doorway and gives him a nod. She’s letting him know she’s there for him as well. He nods back.

“You ok?” Moira whispers to me.

“Yeah.”

“Ok.” She gives me a hug too. “Call if you need me.”

“Thanks.”

—

Luke and I don’t talk once they have left. He concentrates on watching Holly, and I fumble around the flat, pretending to have something to do. Tidying. Dishes. Whatever.

It feels like forever. But after about ten minutes, the intercom buzzes.

I come out the girls’ bedroom and lock eyes with Luke.

He stands up and then looks back down at Holly, and he moves out of sight, away from the doorway, into the room. I guess that’s as much confirmation as I’m going to get that he’s ready.

A minute later, Nick is standing at our door awkwardly. He’s wearing the same jacket he was last time I saw him. The same jeans too, I think.

It’s weird not to see him all in black. It’s weird to have him standing in my apartment at all. He’s from a different world. Two realities colliding.

“Hi.”

“Hey.”

“Come in.”

He steps inside and I gesture towards the living room.

“Luke’s just through there with Holly,” I say, letting him know. Right now, it’s about as much as my brain can handle to string a sentence together, so that will have to do.

Nick eyes the doorway, looks at me one more time, apprehensive, and then goes through. I follow right behind.

Luke’s face is dark as we come in. Nick swallows. They nod at each other. I look between them nervously.

He takes in the room, this little glimpse into my life. The apartment is pretty bare to be honest. Interior décor hasn’t been my priority with two children and a life to rebuild. There’s a couple of Hannah’s drawings stuck to the fridge. A photo of Holly with Moira and Erin, from before I got out. One picture of all of us that Luke put there on the windowsill.

His eyes come to the little girl sitting by the coffee table. Holly’s playing with her stacking boxes quietly, puzzled by them, oblivious to the scene that’s going on above her level. My heart pounds as he catches sight of her. His face softens a little, some of his nerves giving way to something else.

He just stares at her, and Luke and I watch him. He doesn’t say anything.

I think back to when I first saw her, after I got out. As happy as I was, I was terrified that she wouldn’t remember me. But she accepted me. It wasn’t easy, but it was natural. I started singing her to sleep every night, the same lullabies I had sung in the nursery at the Waterford’s, and I think it helped. Maybe she remembered that, somewhere deep down.

Nick doesn’t have memories like that with her to lean on, though.

I’m broken out of my reverie. For some reason, Luke lets out a laugh under his breath.

“So… you were just a driver, right?” he asks pointedly.

Nick pulls his gaze away from Holly. He looks a bit shellshocked at that.

Luke nods silently back at Nick, his eyes intent, angry, acknowledging something, but I don’t know what.

“I’m sorry,” Nick says, eventually. “It wasn’t my place to tell you,” He shakes his head, looking down. “Not then.”

I realise this is some reference to when they met before. My head still reels thinking about it; what it must have been like for both of them. Luke finding out I was pregnant. Nick confronted with my past.

Luke scoffs again, incredulous. Offended.

“But it was your place to sleep with my wife?”

“Luke…” I mutter.

“It seems like there’s a lot you kept quiet about. From both of us,” he cuts, still glaring, gesturing at me.

“Luke, please. Not with Holly here.”

A beat. I hold my breath.

He exhales loudly. “Ok. I’m sorry,” he nods. Turns and paces. Stares at the wall for a moment. Looks back at Nick.

I can’t blame him for what he’s said. Only a saint would have been able to resist saying _something_. To be honest, I’m impressed that Luke has composed himself again, because, _fuck me_ , if I was him, if Holly wasn’t here, I’m not sure I could.

I can see that his comment has stung Nick. As true as it is. But he takes it, and lets his gaze falls on me with the weight of it. I can’t read him. It looks like there’s a lot he wants to say, but he has no intention of saying any of it. It’s safer that way, I guess.

_God forbid he actually try and explain himself_ , I think.

_Help me, Nick. Give me something._

But he won’t.

Silence descends on us again.

And so we stand there. Luke, my husband; Nick, the man I once told my husband I had loved; and me.

I’m not sure if this is better or worse than I thought it was going to be.

Nick’s stare finds its way back to Holly. He can’t take his eyes off her. I wonder what he’s thinking. She has his hair. His lips. She’s a thinker, like him. She soaks everything in, a fast learner. But she has a zest for life. She’s happy. It’s what we wanted for her.

I’m desperate for anything to ease this situation between the three of us, anything to break us out of this impasse.

“Do you want to hold her?” I ask.

Nick freezes. He eyes me warily, but nods.

“Yeah.” He glances at Luke. “If that’s ok…”

Luke swallows. He wouldn’t say no, not to that. He moves towards her. “Hey, come here, baby girl,” he breathes, grabbing Holly from the floor. She smiles. He plants a kiss on her and then holds her carefully out to Nick, who takes her awkwardly.

I remember the last time he held her, how scared he was then, too. She was so tiny, so perfect. At the time, it was my happiest moment in Gilead. One of the happiest of my life. But it’s painful now, so painful. Too much has changed.

He’s trying to smile now, so as not to scare her, but he’s so fearful, I can see it. Not sure how she’ll respond. Months and months have passed and he’s even more of a stranger to her than he was before.

“Hey, Holly” he says softly. “I’m Nick.”

She doesn’t move, she just stares. She looks unsure of him.

My chest tightens.

Within seconds, she reaches out to Luke, and says:

“Dada.”

And if it’s possible to see a man physically break in front of you, I see it then.

Nick’s jaw clenches tight. He shuts right down.

“It’s ok, you take her.” He passes her back to Luke.

To his credit, even Luke looks like he feels bad.

As soon as she’s out of his arms, Nick looks firmly at the floor, hand on his hips, unmoving.

I can’t help the lump in my throat.

All I can see is his smile back in the nursery. _Fuck._

“I’ll put her down for her nap,” Luke says quietly.

I nod. Both of us are unable to speak. He leaves us.

The silence is overwhelming. Suffocating.

“Nick…” I whisper, my throat thick, constricted.

He looks up at me, and there’s a sadness in his eyes that’s more than I can deal with.

_I think about us. The three of us. What we could be._

_I think about it all the time._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was difficult. I found it quite hard to imagine what their conversations would be like, and where June’s head would be at. So I hope I have done them justice. I’m not sure.  
> As always, feedback is very welcome and appreciated.  
> The Handmaid's Tale has been all I've lived and breathed for about two months now (I may need help).


	2. Chapter 2

“Drink up, ladies.” Moira instructs, sitting down as she passes out the drinks she’s just bought.

We’re at a bar, with Emily and Janine. For the last three months, since Janine and I got out, we try and meet up all together every couple of weeks, at least. Although, this time, it’s been three. We all volunteer with the refugee resettlement programme, trying to give back what Canada has given to us, so we see each other regularly. But it’s nice to set time aside to meet as a group.

“I haven’t seen you at any of the meetings, lately, Emily” Janine says. She means the Handmaids’ meetings. Part of her role is helping run a support network out of the refugee center. We meet twice a week. It’s open to any former Handmaids who want to go; a drop in. I haven’t been for a while, either. It’s hard to find the time, and I’ve been battling some internal demons of my own, ones I’m not ready to share.

“I know,” Emily mutters, withdrawn. “Sorry.” She’s always quiet, but tonight, she seems quieter.

“How are the girls, June?” Janine asks, smiling, changing tack. “Is little Holly ok?” She loves babies.

“Yeah, they’re fine” I nod. I take a slightly-too-big swig of my drink. “Everything’s great.”

Moira gives me a look that doesn’t pass me by. I haven’t mentioned Nick getting out of prison yet and neither Janine nor Emily have asked about it, even if either of them have heard it on the news. Moira knows, though. But we’ve hardly spoken about it since she dropped Hannah back afterwards. There’s not much to talk about. Nick left almost as soon as he’d arrived. Nothing’s really changed. It was a week ago.

“What about you, Emily?”

She purses her lips and looks down and immediately I know I was right to think something was wrong.

“Sylvia and I are getting a divorce,” she replies.

The rest of us glance silently around each other, unsure of what to say.

“I’m sorry,” Moira offers.

Emily shakes her head. “We tried. But it’s not the same.”

I look at her and I recognise myself, maybe a few months, or years, down the line. I’d like to tell her she’s not alone, that I’m struggling too, that I can’t connect with my husband anymore. But I don’t dare.

“The thing is…” she continues, distantly. “We never even got our marriage certificate replaced. We don’t have the paperwork to prove that we ever were married. So, we don’t even know how to get one. A divorce.”

—

An hour later, we are waiting for a cab outside. Moira’s got chatting to a girl at the bar, so it’s just Emily, Janine and I going home. Earlier than usual, but none of us were really in the mood to pretend things were fine. Not tonight.

I look down the road.

Nick’s place is close by. We exchanged addresses when we first met up. I could be there in ten minutes.

I’m angry. I need someone to be angry at. I need answers.

I watch Emily climb in to a cab. I can’t stop thinking about what she told us. I feel empty. She’s already moved out of Sylvia’s house, she said. Going home to no one, just a dark, lonely flat. It makes my head reel, to think how much she has gone through.

There are things we lost that can never be returned to us. Years of motherhood, of love, that were taken from us, and we can’t get back. Janine’s son, Caleb, died in Gilead, and she was never even told. She only found out when she got to the refugee center in Canada, trying to search for him. We both got out at the same time. I was there when they told her. She cried into my arms.

It’s not right.

“June? You coming?” Emily calls up to me.

“You go on.” I lie. “I’m gonna check Moira’s ok.”

“We can wait?”

“No, it’s fine. I’ll catch one later. It’s not far.” I say, and shut the cab door.

I turn to watch Moira from the window. She’s chatting away, smiling. The other girl looks nice. Moira’s fine. She doesn’t see me.

Once the cab is out of sight, I start walking up the road.

—

Sure enough, I end up at Nick’s building. Not quite knowing how I got there, just knowing that I need to talk to him. I need him to hear me out.

Someone’s leaving the complex when I walk up, and I let myself in the open door.

I recite his apartment number in my head as I climb the stairs, head along the balcony. It’s late. It’s pretty empty.

When I find his door, my hand immediately pounds on it. I don’t give myself a chance to second guess. After a minute, he opens it and then freezes, shocked to see me.

“Hey.”

I don’t say anything. But he stands aside to let me in. I walk through the small hallway, into what I imagine is the main room.

The living room is bare. Hardly any furniture. There’s no photos. He’s only just got out, so I don’t know what I was expecting, but it feels soulless. There’s a sofa, a window, a table with two chairs. Kitchen counters along one wall, and a couple of appliances. That’s it.

“You okay?” he asks, just like he always did. It’s a stupid question right now, he knows. He must see it in my face.

“No. I am not fucking okay.”

He swallows. “What’s wrong?”

“I need you to explain it to me.”

“Explain what?” he says soberly, looking up at me as he says it. But I can tell that he knows exactly what I am talking about. He’s been waiting for this.

“I just saw Emily. _Ofglen_.” I seethe. “She’s getting a divorce from her wife. And she’s thinking about having surgery, too, to try and mend what they _did to her.”_ She told me that last week, when we were alone at the centre.

His face is blank, nervous.

“All that time. You made me think you were like the rest of us. Trapped. But you helped to fucking build it, Nick.” I shake my head, walking right up to him. Cold.

“That’s not true. It wasn’t like that.”

“Then what was it like?” I say. A muscle in his jaw twitches. “Huh?”

He backs away, turns to the counter. Rests his hands on it, weighing up what to say.

But he doesn’t say anything.

“ _Huh_?” I repeat. He’s not getting out of this.

Stoicism won’t help him today.

He taps his fingers on the worktop and then looks me right in the eye.

I remember standing like this, once before. In the kitchen.

I told him I didn’t know who he was, even then. I still don’t.

“Talk to me, Nick.” I say. It’s not a choice. “Fucking talk to me.”

“What’s the point?” He shakes his head. ”There’s nothing I could say that would make it right.” He sounds empty as he speaks. Like he’s already had this conversation, with himself, a thousand times, and he’s never found the answer. Like he’s already given up.

I knew he would do this. Shut down, block me out.

“You could _try_.”

He exhales and turns away, hands on his hips. He stands for a second and then walks to the couch, sinking down on to it. He rests his elbows on his knees and covers his face with his hands.

“I don’t _want_ to talk about it, June.” he sighs, broken. ”It was _fucking_ awful.”

It’s not an answer. It’s not what I need. But it’s enough to make me check myself. It stops me in my tracks.

I remember that he must have scars too. Eden. The front. Prison. So many more things I don’t know about. Do I even want to know, really? Yes, I was a Handmaid. There’s things we went through that no one else will ever understand. But I’m not the only one with trauma.

_Gilead is within you._

“They were monsters,” he mutters. “You know they were.”

I just stare at him, and wait.

“It happened slowly. I needed a job. Badly. That’s why I joined…” he trails off, stopping himself. He doesn’t want to sound like he’s making excuses. “I needed money—“

“So you joined a religious cult that wanted to oppress and abuse women?” I cut in, sharply. “Pretty sure Target would have been an easier place to find a job.”

“Do you really believe I wanted that? That I knew what it would be like? After what we shared?”

“What did you _share_ with me, Nick? Really? I don’t know who you are. I thought I did but I was wrong.”

“Who did you _think_ I was, June? Did you think I was innocent?”

He has a point. I tried to find out more about him, at first. But I know that there was a time when I stopped wanting to know anything. Didn’t allow myself to doubt him. I wanted to lose myself in him, and just let him love me. Whoever he was.

But that was wrong. I should have known the truth, and he chose never to tell me.

“It doesn’t matter what I _think_ , Nick. It doesn’t matter what _you_ thought. It matters what you _did._ Or what you _didn’t_ do. To stop them.”

“I know that. _Don’t you think I know that?_ I can’t change any of it. I wish I could. I tried to fix it in Chicago. That’s all I can do now.”

He sighs, shaking his head, brow furrowed.

“I’m sorry,” he says, as if he’s realised he hasn’t said that yet, but we both know that is meaningless. What can I do with “I’m sorry”? Sorry won’t give Emily back her marriage. It won’t grow back an eye for Janine. It won’t stop the nightmares I have, staring at aturquoise ceiling. It won’t help my little girl sleep at night, crying because she doesn’t feel safe.

We reach an impasse. He slowly moves across the room, to the countertop, and pours himself a drink.

“They made it sound like it would be better. For everyone.” he explains. “They didn’t tell us everything they were planning. They lied.”

A silence falls between us.

I think about Chicago. I can’t ignore what he did, how he helped, just because I’m angry he never told me about the Crusade. It meant a lot. It saved a lot of people. If it weren’t for Gilead losing Chicago, I might still be there now. It makes a difference. Actions speak louder than words; they say more than “I’m sorry” ever could, and he knows that. I’m sure that’s why he did it.

What it comes down to is this: I don’t believe he’s evil. I can’t. If he was a part of it, I believe him; I believe that he didn’t realise what it would become. And when he did realise, it was too late. I remember how quickly everything changed, how it crept up on us and before we knew it, it was already over. Getting fired. My bank account getting frozen. The protest.

Was he there, that day, when they started shooting at us? Did he know it would happen?

I look at this man in front of me and I can’t imagine it’s possible. All those times he helped me. Comforted me. He didn’t believe in that place, of that I am certain.

I sit down on the couch. He hands me a glass. I swirl it around in my hand as he sits in the chair across the room. With each rotation, I travel further away, in my head. Far away from here, to somewhere before. Before the doubt crept in.

“You know, I used to imagine this. Us. In an apartment. Somewhere normal.”

This throws him. This change of direction. He wasn’t expecting this.

And it’s barely a whisper, when he eventually says it. I barely hear it, but he does say it: “Me too.”

I glance around the room as my eyes fill, and he watches me. I remember his room, above the garage. I felt safe there, in the place he’d built. There was a photo, some books, a record player. Little pieces of what could have been a normal life. I don’t know where those things are now. But it wasn’t the things that made me feel safe; it was him.

“Do you still love me?” I say quietly, my voice quivering. I have to press my lips together to hold back a sob.

I can’t describe the look he gives me then. Dark, heavy.

“Don’t.”

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t ask me a question you know I can’t answer,” he replies, standing again.

He’s right. I shouldn’t have said it.

“You have a family.”

“What about Holly?” I ask.

His brow furrows and he turns away. He doesn’t understand why I’m doing this to him. To us.

“Aren’t you her family, too?”

_Fight for her, Nick._

He shakes his head.

“She deserves better than me,” he mutters.

“That’s not your decision to make. That’s hers,” I cry.

“What?” he scoffs, under his breath. “You think she’ll be proud of me?”

I swallow.

“Don’t you want to be in her life?”

Maybe that wasn’t fair to ask, when I’m living with my husband, who is raising Nick’s daughter as his own. But he doesn’t reply, he just looks away, and I can’t cope with his silence any longer.

I’m not going to get the answers I need. Not here. Not tonight. If anything, I’m more confused.

“I should go.”

I make my way out into the hall, but he follows.

“June, wait…” he says, and he stops me, turning me round. I’m backed on to the wall.

Our eyes lock and in my head I’m back there again. In the hallway. At the Globe. At the hospital. All those places all at once. His gaze bores into me, those deep, brown eyes reaching in. I wonder if he’s thinking it too.

For seconds—maybe ten, maybe thirty, I stop counting—we just breathe each other in. He smells of bourbon and cigarettes.

I thought he would die.

I thought I’d never see him again.

“I missed you,” I admit, without even realising I’m saying it. Scared to voice it, scared of what it means, but it escapes nonetheless.

His eyes flit between mine, searching.

He does something then that takes me by surprise. He brings his hands up to my face, cupping my jaw on either side.

He’s wiping tears away on my cheeks that I was only distantly aware had fallen.

I soften into him. “Nick…”

His face is so close to me I can feel the heat coming off him.

And before I know it, he’s kissing me, gently at first and then more urgently, and I feel myself falling away. Everything is soft, and warm, and safe.

I sigh into his mouth, a cry escaping my lips.

He breaks away, pressing his forehead to mine, panting. Not sure if I want this.

I do. I don’t want him to to stop. I pull his face to mine and kiss him back. Desperate.

I just want to feel something. Anything. If I know anything about this man, I know that he can give me an escape. Even if it’s ourselves we’re escaping from.

We don’t think. We just do. Fumbling our way into his bedroom, all I hear is his breath in my ear, ragged, as his mouth trails down my neck. My senses are overloaded; I have no room to question this, only to feel. In a scramble, we pull off our shoes, his shirt, his pants, mine, my top, all in quick succession, and we fall as one on to the bed. He sinks down to me and I grab his hair, coarse between my fingers, and run my hands down his back, feeling his skin prick at my touch.

I could tell you that I had forgotten what it felt like, to be loved by him. The truth is, I remember everything. Every kiss, every touch, every movement. It’s what kept me sane. But now it feels like a drug. Intoxication. Too good.

When he pushes inside me, I almost drown in the feeling. It’s better than I remember: more, somehow. He closes his eyes as we adjust, and kisses my cheek softly. The room is dark—only the lamp by his bed is on—and it casts gold light and shadows on us, like echoes, as we move, slowly at first and then faster, harder, pounding. His lips and hands are everywhere and I cling to him as if I’ve never touched him before. Every time with him before felt like it could be the first and last, always, and this is no different.

And slowly, as we lose ourselves, as we remember, the world fades to black. Or maybe we fade, together.

_I’m here because it feels good._


	3. Chapter 3

I’ve been here before.

I’m sitting up over the end of Nick’s bed. Watching him as he sleeps.

_Wishing I wasn’t such a fucking weakling._

It’s 2am. We fell asleep. I stare down at the phone in my hands. Four missed calls from Luke. One from Moira. Three messages. He doesn’t know where I am.

I feel sick. Guilty. _He doesn’t deserve this._ I owed him more than this.

I don’t look at Nick again. Instead, I pull myself up and start collecting my clothes from the floor, like a child sneaking out of the house at night.

“June.”

I look up and he’s watching me from the bed. He doesn’t smile. There’s a trace of a frown across his face.

He sits up but I move further away, across the room, pretending not to see as he lifts his arm to touch me.

I get dressed, all the time trying to ignore the feeling of his eyes on my back.

“I should go,” I state.

“It’s too late,” he replies, after a beat. “It’s not safe.”

I hear him pulling on some clothes, boxers and a T-shirt.

I shake my head. “It’s not far. I’ll be fine. I’ll get a cab-”

“June“ he interrupts, standing up. He walks over to me, puts his hand on my arm, wanting some kind of contact. Some sign that this didn’t mean nothing.

I don’t let myself think about what happened, how it felt… because I know that I can’t have those thoughts right now. If I remember how it felt, I’ll never leave. And I can’t be here.

It shouldn’t have happened. It can’t happen again.

“I need to get home, Nick.” I say, more forcefully, and my voice cracks. “Luke’s been ringing me all night. He doesn’t know where I am.”

He drops his arm.

He sighs, heavy, nodding.

“Let me get a cab with you, then.”

I pause, considering it.

“We can just get one to your building,” he adds. “Then I’ll go.”

I mull over it for a few seconds and then give in, nodding.

“Thank you.”

—

The journey is tense. We don’t speak.

I text Moira that I’m okay, stringing it out, staring at my phone for much longer than I need to.

I look out the window, or straight ahead. Anywhere but at him.

It doesn’t pass me by that the cab driver keeps glancing in his rear view mirror at Nick. He notices, too. It makes me nervous.

We finally arrive at my building and pay up. Nick’s putting his wallet back in his pocket, when the driver speaks.

“Do I know you?”

I see Nick stiffen next to me. The air around us freezes.

“I don’t think so.”

“I do… you’re that guy. The Commander. I seen you on the news.”

Nick just stares, shutting down, putting up walls. Like he’s waiting for the judgement. The confrontation.

“I used to live in Chicago,” the driver smiles. “Before.”

The smile throws Nick. He blinks, then nods silently, acknowledging him.

“Thank you for what you did, man.”

I wasn’t expecting that. We glance at each other.

“You don’t need to thank me,” Nick says evenly, and he opens the door to step out. “Have a good night.”

I follow his lead, and we shut the doors. He walks round to my side.

We watch the cab drive off.

“How will you get back?”

“It’s fine. I’ll get another cab,” he says, shrugging. “Maybe I’ll walk.”

“Does that happen often? Getting recognised?” I ask quietly, gazing down at the ground.

“A few times,” he nods. “It usually doesn’t go that well,” he adds, trying to make light of it.

_What does that mean?_

The moment passes, and we are left where we were again. In silence.

I look up at him. He sighs, reaching out to my hand. He gathers it lightly in his, brushing my thumb with his. I don’t fight it. I allow myself this one thing.

“You okay?” he asks. Checking in.

I don’t answer. I feel like elastic, stretched too thin.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

He shakes his head, giving my hand a little squeeze.

“It’s okay.”

—

When I open the door, Luke comes out of the bedroom within seconds.

His eyes are wide, concerned.

“What’s wrong? Where were you?”

I quickly drop my bag in the hall and head silently for the living room.

“I’m sorry,” I reply, under my breath. The girls are asleep. “I’m fine.”

It feels safer not to say any more than that.

I walk past him, past the doorway and into the living room, making a beeline for the couch. My heart is pounding.

Of course, he follows me.

I stare at the TV, which is off, but it’s something to look at.

“June, what happened?”

I close my eyes.

_Skin on skin. So soft. So warm. He’s kissing me, hard. I’m surrounded. He’s everywhere, all I can feel, like water, covering me. I hold him close. It’s been too long. I’m on fire._

I remember thinking, _Don’t let this end._

I can’t lie to Luke. I can’t do it. I don’t want to be that person.

Steeling myself, I hold my breath, aware that life is about to change. My marriage is about to splinter.

“I slept with Nick.”

I drop the words into the room and they land like a lead weight.

There’s nothing, for a long time. All I can hear is him breathing.

I don’t want to look at him, but I force myself to.

He stares at me, dumbfounded.

“Jesus, June…” he says after a while, rubbing his hand over his face. He frowns.

He looks back and I watch him. I can see him calculating. What it means. What to say. How to act. Rolling it over in his mind. Hardening.

“I’m sorry,” I say, my eyes filling up.

In the end, he doesn’t speak. He just leaves the room.

—

“Mommy?”

I jolt awake from my position on the couch. I haven’t moved since I got home. Hannah is shaking me.

It’s morning now. Sunlight streams through the blinds. I rub my eyes.

“Hey, Banana. Holly still sleeping?”

She nods.

Then yesterday comes flooding back. I swallow.

“Sorry. Looks like Mommy fell asleep on the couch last night.”

“You okay?” I ask, stroking her cheek. My baby.

“Why is Daddy packing?”

My breath catches. Slowly, I stand, and walk to the bedroom. Luke comes out the bathroom, holding a toothbrush and some shower gel. He startles when he sees me, but glances Hannah over my shoulder, and recollects himself. He coughs and then keeps going, into the bedroom.

On the bed is a holdall. Clothes are folded inside. He puts the toiletries into a bag and shoves them in.

I swallow and turn to Hannah.

“Mommy and Daddy are just going to talk alone for a minute, okay, sweetie?”

She nods. I shut the bedroom door between us, closing us in.

“What are you doing?” I say.

“I asked Moira if I can stay with her for a few days.” he says, continuing to pack. He doesn’t look at me.

“Luke, stop. What about the girls… we need to talk about this…”

I try and seek his eyes out, but he refuses to look at me.

“Luke-“

He closes his eyes and exhales.

“I can’t, June. I just can’t. I need some time.”

Of course, I understand. I hate myself for doing this to him. Again.

He zips up the bag and pulls it over his shoulder, opening the door. Hannah’s still there. He stops.

“Daddy?”

“It’s okay, Hannah. I’ll see you tomorrow. I’m just going to stay with Moira for a bit.”

“But why?”

He kneels down and cups her face in his hands, then leans forward to kiss the top of her head.

“I love you, ok? And your sister. Very much. Mommy loves you too. It’s not your fault. It’s just something I have to do right now.”

She scrunches up her mouth. Not happy, but accepting it.

“Okay.”

“Okay,” he says, his voice strained. Wrapping her in a hug. “Bye, baby.”

He pulls his bag up again and heads to the front door. I follow.

“I’ll call you. About the girls,” he says as he opens it.

“Luke, I’m sorry, okay? You don’t need to do this…”

He shoots me a look, pleading. I bite my tongue.

Then there’s just nothing again. We’re frozen in place, both scared to move forward from this moment, wherever it leads.

“I waited for you,” he states. Putting it out there; expanding the space between us.

“I know,” I whisper.

He sniffs, and then he pulls the door closed behind him.


	4. Chapter 4

Luke’s been gone for a week now.

Today, Hannah and Holly are both with him. So, today, I’m alone.

The last time I had this much time to myself, this much time to pass, it was a whole different world. And now all I can do is think. Trapped: this time, all in my head.

I haven’t seen him since he left. Moira has collected and dropped the girls, back and forth. Each time, she frowns a little more at me than she had last time. I assume it’s judgement. Maybe it’s pity.

But today, when the key turns in the lock and she opens the door, Moira doesn’t have the girls with her. It’s just her. She’s come to see me.

“Hey.”

“Hey,” she replies, walking into the room, as I watch her. “How are you?”

“How’s Luke?” I respond, without actually responding. I don’t know how I am.

“He’s fine.”

She keeps saying that. Every time. I stare blankly at her, unconvinced.

She corrects herself: “He’ll be fine.”

I nod, sniffing. Curling myself tighter into a ball on the couch, and folding my arms.

“You must hate me,” I mutter.

“…Hate you?” she repeats back, after a moment. Then she sighs, shaking her head.

“June… Look, you need to understand something.”

She places herself right in front of me, and sits down on to the coffee table. Directly opposite me, staring straight at me, so that I have to take what she’s saying in.

“God knows, I love Luke, okay? He was there for me when no one else was. He’s family. And when I heard about what you—“

I shoot a look at her, feeling vulnerable. She coughs awkwardly, resetting.

“…when he told me what _happened_ … I’m not gonna tell you it was easy to hear.”

Resigning myself, I look down. This is what I deserve. I prepare myself to be told all the ways I’ve broken everything that could have been saved.

She pauses.

“But you’re my _girl_.”

I glance up, my eyes finding hers.

“And if he’s not gonna make you happy, then... then that’s okay.”

Stunned into silence, I just blink.

“You don’t _owe_ anyone anything, June. The promises you made him, before… that was _before_.”

“He knows it wasn’t right between you, deep down. He’ll be okay. And Holly, and Hannah, they will be too.”

“No…” I shake my head. “Hannah…” I echo, not believing that what she says could possibly be true. _How could I have done this to Hannah?_

“Hannah will be fine,” she repeats, nodding her head, to counter mine, which is still shaking. “Yes, she will. In time. She’s strong, and she’s loved.”

“It won’t be easy, but the most important thing is that you keep your shit together, okay?”

She smiles. Our smile. Our smile that says _I’ve got you._ And I can’t help but give her a little one back.

She leans forward, and cups my face in her hands, willing me to look at her. I do.

“You’re free now. And you get to decide what that means.”

—

After that, the space no longer feels like a pool that I’m drowning in. It starts to help. It feels like air.

When the girls are here—either, or both of them—I get to just be a mom again. And not a wife. Luke starts to drop the girls home after he sees them. Hannah tells me about what they’ve done that day together, and it’s okay. It doesn’t rip my heart out like I always thought it would. I feel relieved. Hannah still looks at me a certain way, sometimes. I catch her staring through me in to space, like she’s confused, but it feels like something we will be able to navigate, when she wants to talk. The path forward no longer feels impossible, now that we have taken the first steps.

And when the girls aren’t here, I’m just me. I spend time with Emily or Janine, Moira or myself. I read. I get to know what I like again. I write. Nothing in particular. I used to have a diary, but that feels too self-absorbed now. Sometimes, I just write my name. June. Over and over again, on scrap paper, like a child practising a signature. Because I can. Because I won’t lose a hand. Now and then, I actually forget that, but it’s only been four months. New habits die hard.

I go for walks around Toronto. The park. A coffee bar. I go to the Handmaid’s support meetings in the evenings. We sit in a circle, but there’s no pointing this time. No _“your fault”_. Mostly, I just listen to the other girls. I hear their stories. It reminds me of when I read the letters from Jezebels. Like hands reaching out to hold mine; to carry me. We are in this together. I had been so caught up with rebuilding my family and my life before that I didn’t see I was still falling apart.

So I give myself a fucking break. I hate the pain I’ve caused Luke, but, the truth is, he and I were already over, we just didn’t admit it to eachother. The woman Luke married is buried at the Red Center.

So I allow myself to be, and to live.

And I start to think about the future, like Moira said. About the future that I want.

—

One morning as I’m getting out of the shower, I hear my mobile ringing. It’s Nick.

He’s never rung me before. We’ve kept each other at arm’s reach, since that night. We have kept in touch, but I’ve not seen him. I’m still circling that territory in my mind, reluctant to touch on it until I feel the rest is sorted. But still… when I see his name lit up, my heart skips a beat.

“Hi.”

“Hey. You ok?” His voice sounds different on the phone.

“Yeah, I’m good. You?”

“Yeah. I’m fine.”

A beat.

“Did you hear the news?” he says, sounding hesitant, unsure.

“…No?”

Silence.

“Nick? What is it?”

“Where are you right now? Are you with anyone?”

“I’m just at home. Is everything ok?”

I hear him breathe in one more time, and I pick up the TV remove, about to turn it on, to see if something’s happened, when—

“The Waterfords.”

The remote falls out of my hand.

“They’ve been arrested. Near DC. The Embassy just rang to tell me.”

I stand stock still.

I let his words unravel and resonate around me. They don’t seem real. A figment. A dream. The blurred haze of a mirage.

Then, I close my eyes, and I breathe. In. And out. Filling my lungs.

Eventually, I smile.

_Finally._

“June? Are you okay?”

“Say that again,” I say serenely.

At that, I actually hear him smile, too.

“Fred and Serena,” he complies, playing along, voice low. “They’re locked up.” Indulging my fantasy. “Behind bars.”

I sit down on the couch, the words still dancing around my head. Covering my face with my free hand, I begin to laugh.

Nick just listens to me for a while, content to wait until my soft laughter dies and I am quiet again. He continues:

“They’ve asked me in to go to the offices tomorrow morning. There’s a few things they want to ask me about. For evidence.”

“Ask you about? Haven’t you already told them everything? Before you were released?”

“I guess they have some more questions. Maybe things they’ve raised since their arrest.”

_What things?_ But I swallow down the nerves. Nick doesn’t seem worried.

I remind myself of what I have just learned: they’re in prison. They can’t hurt me. Not anymore.

“Do you want to meet up after?” I blurt out.

He pauses.

“Yeah. Okay.”

“Okay. I’ll wait for you at the offices. Let me know what time.”

When I hang up, I see the missed call. The Embassy had rung me too, to let me know.

I’m glad I heard it from him.

—

The next day, while I’m waiting for Nick at the Embassy, there’s a weird atmosphere in the waiting room. The clerks are running from room to room, flashes of movement across the hallway as doors open and close in quick succession. I hear a lot of hushed whispering. It puts me on edge, but when a door opens and I see him walking through it, looking untroubled, I relax. He scans the room as soon as he’s out, knowing I would be there, and clocks me straight away. He turns to the law officer who was in with him and shakes their hand, before walking over.

“Hey.”

“Hi, how was it?”

He nods calmly. “It was fine. Good.”

“What did they ask you about?”

“Mainly questions about Waterford. What I heard when I was a driver.” He swallows. “The Handmaid before you. What I knew.”

“Some other stuff, too.”

And I get the feeling he means something about me, but I don’t push it.

“How are you doing?” he asks.

His eyes are kind, concerned. He knows Luke has moved out. I told him, a couple of days after it happened. But he has never asked more about it, only whether the girls and I are okay. He’s never assumed anything, even though he must guess why it happened.

“I’m good. Better.” I smile up at him.

He seems unsure of my expression, at first. Searching my face, he looks apprehensive, silent. Wondering.

We are distracted by a door opening loudly, and someone marching down the hall, almost in a run. _Something is going on._

But Nick turns back to me, and remembers something else.

Clearing his throat, he says “Um… I got something earlier… for Holly...”

He reaches down into the pocket of his coat and pulls out something small and white.

As he holds it out to me, it falls in to shape. It’s a soft toy; a little rabbit, with floppy ears and a yellow jumper.

“I thought it was cute,” he says shyly, a little smile playing on his lips, like he’s imagining her with it. “Will you give it to her for me?”

I can’t help myself from breaking out into a grin as I take it from him. I nod.

He coughs again nervously. “I wasn’t sure about the fluff… if it was safe? But the label says it’s for one year plus.”

I feel a pang in my heart that he even thought of that. That he made sure. That she’s a year—and a half, now—old, and he’s only held her twice. He loves her so much—I’ve never doubted _that_ —and she doesn’t even know him. I never told her about him, after I got free, because the stories I could have told, the memories I had, were doused in pain and confusion. And because Luke was always staring at me, whenever my mind began to drift. But Holly is more important than whatever I’m going through. She deserves to know him; she deserves all the love she can get.

“She’ll love it,” I assure him.

“Yeah?” he says, and, just like that, there it is. _That_ smile. The one I haven’t seen since the nursery. It punches me in the gut.

Our eyes meet and my breath hitches in my throat. I quickly look away again, embarrassed, and busy myself with putting the rabbit toy in to my bag.

“Hey!” someone yells suddenly, as he bursts out of an office. He’s not speaking directly to us, but to the room in general. “Turn on the TV! Someone turn on the news!”

We all stare at him. He has his mobile up to his ear, a look of wonder on his face.

A woman at the front desk switches on the screen in the corner of the waiting room.

On the television, the words BREAKING NEWS roll across a banner as images of military trucks driving along city roads flood the screen, spliced with a muted video of the President making a statement.

“ _Again, breaking news if you are just joining us this morning. President Wilson announced only minutes ago that High Commander Winslow has signed an act of unconditional surrender of all remaining Gilead military to the Allied forces. Gilead forces have surrendered to the United States army in Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia—the only territories still occupied in any capacity by the now-former regime—effective immediately.”_

Gasps spread like wildfire around us. People in the waiting room, and the hallway, start whooping and clapping. Some pick up phones to call friends and loved ones.

“PRAISE FUCKING BE!” I hear someone yell. His laughter is infectious. The man works his way through everyone in the room, patting them on the back or squeezing them tight. Here, in Little America, in this very building, are the people who have been working for this day for years. Never giving up hope, always fighting.

The man gets to Nick and me and is no different with us, pulling us both in for hugs. Nick smiles awkwardly, and then allows himself a laugh too.

My mouth is open. We all believed this day was coming for a while, but to hear it, and see it happening, is something else. We lock eyes again, both amazed, staring at each other, giddy with shock.

I zone back in to what the newsreader is saying.

_“…the liberation has lasted for seven months, beginning when Allied forces retook Chicago, Illinois, in September 2018, and Dallas, Texas, a few weeks later…”_

Nick’s attention is brought to the screen, at the mention of Chicago.

That was him. Nick was part of that. And he’s still helping, now, _today_ , to bring those responsible to justice.

I watch him as his thoughts begin to travel far away. The smile on his face morphs to a distant frown, as the pictures on the screen—of soldiers, and marching, and war—reflect in his eyes.

Another of the doors down the hall opens at the loud cheering going on. Heads peering out at the commotion and walking out, but I don’t look up. I’m just about to reach out and touch Nick’s arm, to try and bring him back into the room, when I hear:

“June?”

I know that voice.

My mouth drops open.

“Oh my God!” I exclaim. “Rita?!”

Nick’s head snaps round. She gasps, again, at the sight of him, and dashes over to where we are standing, grabbing me first, in a tight hug.

When we pull apart, I take her in.

Her hair. I can see her hair. I’ve never seen it out before.

She’s beautiful. And she’s safe. And she’s _here._

We just laugh, smiling, both reduced to tears in seconds.

“Are you okay?” I say, grabbing at her coat with my hands, checking she is real. “I didn’t know if you were still….”

_…alive_ , my brain finishes.

Rita nods emotionally. “I got out three days ago. They raided the Waterfords’ house. In DC.“

“We know. We heard they were arrested,” Nick provides.

She smiles, looks back down the hall. “They wanted to ask me some questions.”

I nod. So she’s here for the same reason Nick was, then.

She brings her hand up to her cheeks, wiping them. It’s pointless; the tears are still coming.

“How is your little girl?” she asks me.

“She’s perfect,” I say, tears filling my eyes. “Her name is Holly.”

To Rita, she had been Nichole. As she processes it, she smiles wider. “Holly,” she confirms.

She glances between Nick and me, wondering. There’s a question there, in her eyes, but she doesn’t ask. She doesn’t want to risk this happy moment. Instead, she turns her attention to Nick and takes him in. Her chin trembles. She shakes her head in disbelief and pulls him in tightly. He reciprocates, closing his eyes and wrapping his arms around her. He’s smiling too, relieved to see her.

“I heard about what you did. Through Mayday.” I hear her say softly, at his ear, her voice thick with tears. “Thank you.”

They pull apart, eyes locked. He nods in answer, unable to speak, as she cups her hands to his face and kisses his forehead. Maternal. Proud.

I think back to when I greeted him, when I saw him that first time, a few weeks ago. I didn’t hug him. I didn’t thank him. I didn’t even move.

I wonder how I could have been so blind then, to things I already knew: that he was never one of them. Always one of us.

I should have known. I shouldn’t have doubted him.

As guilt washes over me like a wave, Rita turns to the screen, taking the picture in.

“I can’t believe it” she says, breathless, laughing quietly again. “It’s finally over.”

She reaches out to both of us, pulling us in, and we hold her as she cries. Her wounds are still fresh, but her smile grows and grows in confidence, as we allow the news to sink in.

Those around us continue to celebrate.

We stand together—the three of us—and begin to heal.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Quick recap as it was a while since I posted the last chapter (sorry): This chapter takes place on the same day as the previous chapter, in which Gilead had announced its final surrender, and Nick and June had reunited with Rita at the US embassy in Little America in Toronto.
> 
> **TRIGGER WARNING** (this is also a spoiler): This chapter contains a shooting incident, and the aftermath. It's a heavy scene; not an easy read.

Nick, Rita and I spend the rest of the day together.

We learn that Rita has come to Toronto because of family. Her sister, Camila, got out during the Crusade, with her husband and son. She hadn’t known Rita was alive until two days ago.

Five years. Five years, not knowing if your sister was dead. Rita hadn’t known for sure either, though she had hoped Camila was safe.

Word spreads throughout the day in Little America of an impromptu vigil organised for the evening. We hear it from Moira, who texts me; she’s going to say a few words. While today’s news of Gilead’s final surrender has brought so much relief and joy, there’s still an undercurrent of mourning, a sense of needing to remember. Somehow, knowing there will be no more suffering makes the pain fresher and brings it up to the surface. There are still so many wounds to heal; the work is not over. We’d been so busy with getting through the day; trying not to think of others, like us, still trapped there, that we became numb. In order to survive, we taught ourselves not to feel.

As the three of us make our way there to the park, Rita turns to us.

“Do you two want to come over for dinner tonight? You can meet my sister. I’ll cook something. Like old times,” she asks, smirking.

Nick and I glance at each other, both tempted.

_Well, she_ is _a great cook._

I’m eager to spend more time with both of them. I don’t want this day to end. I nod, and Nick does too.

“Thanks.”

“Okay,” she smiles. “I’ll just need to get a couple of things before we leave, then.”

—

When we arrive, as the sun sets, there are already more people here than I imagined there would be. It feels like all of Toronto is turning up.

As we shuffle through the people to get more central, the makeshift memorial comes in to view. It’s been there for years, since the first refugees arrived in the city. Always tended, always added to. The stone flowerbeds are lined with photos of families and missing people and in the middle, above them, is a tree, its branches draped with US flags. Moira has told me before that she comes here to remember Odette.

I rang Luke earlier, to ask him to bring the girls. I want them to be here for this—it feels important. He’s not arrived yet, but I message him to explain where to find us when he gets here, now that we’ve settled on a place to stand. I spot Emily standing near Moira, at the centre of the garden, Janine behind them, but they don’t see me.

As the crowd steadily grows, people start lighting candles and a wave of gold and orange spreads out amongst us, against the growing dark. It’s beautiful. Despite the chill in the air, the network of dancing flames keep the cold at bay. It makes me feel a part of something bigger. Something more than any of us. Stronger.

At seven, Moira steps up on a bench to speak. The crowd goes quiet. I smile as I watch her. She is a natural leader. She can carry all of us. Rita, Nick and I all look up to listen.

_“There are no words,”_ she begins.

_“No words to explain what we have lost.”_

She has a microphone. There are a few speakers set up across the park, so everyone can hear. Her voice echoes over us like a ripple, reaching back.

_“Wives. Husbands. Partners. Children. Family. Friends._

_“Today is a new start. But we will never forget them. Now, we have to rebuild. For them. For their memory._

_“Evil will always exist in the world. We know that now more than ever. But we must work together to keep it at bay._

_“It starts with us. All of us. Here. Today. How we treat each other. How we respect each other. How we protect and defend those of us who need support. Those others would choose to hate.”_

Her voice growing louder, shakier, Moira pauses for a second, and glances at the memorial behind her, taking a deep breath. She clears her throat, her eyes shining.

_“There are some things they could never take away. And they never will.”_

_“Hope. Pride. Unity.”_

_“Love.”_

With that, a sea of applause slowly breaks out. The sound weaves us all together.

This many people, standing together, feeling the same way. It can’t mean nothing.

I stand there, proudly, my eyes brimming with tears.

As the applause dies down and Moira continues, Nick glances down at me and sees my face. Instinctively, he reaches for my hand and squeezes it.

“It’s okay,” he whispers quietly.

I nod, and smile.

“I know.”

He puts him arm around my back and I can’t resist the feeling of safety. I lean into him, my head coming to rest in the crook of his neck. I begin to phase out from Moira’s voice.

Nick runs his hand up and down my shoulder, slowly, softly, to soothe me. My eyes drift shut as I breathe him in. I can feel his heart beating. A constant.

His lips press in to my hair, and I feel my own pulse quicken slightly, warmth spreading out from his touch, against the cold.

My heart is full—the people, the candles. Him.

I feel at peace.

Then, a voice behind us:

“June?”

It’s Luke.

We both turn. He is a few steps away from us, holding Holly on his hip, one hand holding Hannah’s. Erin stands nervously behind them.

There is a storm brewing in his eyes.

Nick immediately drops his arm from me and I quickly reset, brushing the moment away, tucking my hair behind my ears.

“Hi,” I fluster, breathless.

Luke just stares at Nick, jaw fixed.

“Hey, baby.” I take Holly from him, trying to distract everyone. “Mommy missed you.” She grins, her eyes sparkling.

Nick avoids Luke’s look and takes in the four of us for a moment, swallowing.

To an outsider, we’d look like the perfect family.

He turns to me.

“I’ll see you later,” he says softly, his voice low. He doesn’t want to cause any issues.

“You don’t have to go...” I frown.

He shakes his head. “It’s fine.”

We arrange with Rita to meet again later, at the convenience store to pick up some ingredients, before going back to Rita’s sister’s together for dinner.

Before he leaves, I catch his gaze fall over Holly for a moment, longingly. Then, he disappears into the crowd, quickly swallowed up.

Suddenly, I’m aware of eyes burning on the back of my neck. The feeling of being watched by someone makes the hairs on my skin stand up. I look behind me, eyes searching, but whoever it was has moved away. If there was anyone at all. The feeling recedes as quickly as it had appeared. I shake it away. All in my head.

I turn back to Hannah as she tugs at my sleeve.

“Mommy, who was that man?” Hannah asks.

“He’s just a friend, sweetie. Mommy was just upset. He was making sure I was okay.”

“Okay. Are you okay now?”

“Yes,” I smile. “I’m much better now you’re here,” I assure her.

I glance at Luke. I want to check he heard me. I feel the urge to explain myself, to let him know it wasn’t what it looked like. It was just a hug. Comfort. Nothing more.

I’m not sure if it’s him I’m trying to convince, or myself. My side feels empty, from where Nick had been holding me before.

I bring my focus back to Luke.

His gaze is lingering after Nick, at the spot where he disappeared. He looks deep in thought. But the anger that was there a minute ago has quelled.

“Luke, this is Rita.” I say, and he snaps out of it. “Rita, this is my husband, Luke.”

Rita smiles, politely, if a little awkwardly. She must have sensed the tension between the three of us. She knows enough to understand why there is tension, although she doesn’t know the whole story. I wonder what she thinks.

“It’s nice to meet you.”

“You too,” Luke replies. They hug briefly in greeting and Luke relaxes. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

Rita laughs softly. “Oh God, what have you said about me?”

“Only good things,” I frown. In jest. “Of course.”

She pushes my shoulder gently, and then her eyes land on Holly. She sighs.

“Hi, sweetie,” Rita breathes. Holly smiles at her.

“Can I hold her?”

“Of course.”

“Hi!” Rita says, grinning wide, as I pass her over. A natural. “You don’t remember me, but I knew you when you were very small.”

Holly giggles, taking her in happily, and then grabs a fistful of her hair. I pretend not to see. Rita can deal with her death grip.

Hannah shuffles her feet, craning her neck to look around. She looks a little overwhelmed by the crowd. I crouch down to her.

“There’s a lot of people here, hey?”

She nods.

I help her climb up onto a little wall behind us, so that she can see better. After a moment, she asks:

“Why is everyone here?”

I pat her coat and stroke the fabric down, as I try to find the words.

“You remember when those men took you away from me? In the forest?”

Her face falls. She nods and swallows, fearful.

“These people are here to make sure that never happens again.”

Her eyes dance across the crowd, taking in the lights. After a few seconds, her brow furrows.

“You mean like… protection?”

I smile, the lump in my throat growing.

“Yes, baby. Exactly. Like protection.”

She looks at me, and then back over the people, and slowly, I see a little smile take root on her lips. It’s like magic.

As Hannah and I finish speaking, the crowd falls silent. Moira steps down.

Then, as if on cue, a small group begins to sing spontaneously, and others join them.

_“O beautiful for spacious skies,_

_For amber waves of grain,_

_For purple mountain majesties_

_Above the fruited plain!”_

It’s still surreal, that Gilead ever happened. To this day, I still feel like I will pinch myself and wake up at any moment, and find myself back in Boston, and that it was all a nightmare.

The voices singing are melancholy, sad, but lined with hope.

_“America! America!_

_God shed His grace on thee_

_And crown thy good with brotherhood_

_From sea to shining sea!”_

I wrap my arms around Hannah and breathe her in. She’s still smiling. She’s safe now. We’ve got her.

—

After the crowd begins to disperse, Rita and I head to the store and wait for Nick. It’s our local.

A couple of minutes after we get there, Nick arrives. I catch Luke glancing at us before disappearing behind an aisle; he’d come to get some groceries too before heading back. Holly fell asleep on Erin’s shoulder earlier, so her and Moira have taken the kids back to their place.

“Hey. Sorry I’m late. Had trouble finding it,” Nick says.

I smile and shake my head. “You’re not.”

Our eyes meet and there’s a moment.

I remember how he held me in the crowd. How he held me that night, a few weeks ago.

I want that feeling again.

Rita coughs next to me, and breaks me out of my daydream. I glance at her and she has an eyebrow raised at me. It’s subtle, but it’s there.

_How long had we been staring at each other?_

“Come on. Will you pick out a dessert with me?” she asks.

I nod before moving to go down the aisle.

Nick bites down a smirk. There’s a spark in his eye that I haven’t seen in a long time. Playful. Amused.

“I’ll buy some drinks,” he says, before turning away in a different direction.

*****

**NICK**

“Nicholas Blaine?”

As he crosses the store to get to the right place, still smiling to himself a little, Nick hears his name and turns around.

A woman is standing in front of him.

Every inch of her looks tense, from the expression on her face to her hands, shoved down in her coat pockets, arms straight.

“…Yeah?”

“My name is Claire Kendrick. I was a Handmaid.”

He stares at her. Immediately, he’s on edge. Something about her feels wrong. Offset. Unhinged.

“My daughter was taken. She doesn’t speak to me anymore,” she chokes. “My husband is dead.”

There are people standing around them, who turn to look. But no one says anything. They let the scene play out.

“Because of men like you.”

He’s struck dumb. He’s been confronted before, but never this much hatred pouring out. She looks consumed with pain.

In the corner of Nick’s eye, Luke appears from behind an aisle. He slowly edges towards them, eyeing her cautiously. The woman has her back to Luke; she doesn’t see him.

_Where is June?_

“And they let you go free?” she says to him, accusingly. There are tears running now, spilling down her cheeks.

“Fuck that,” she seethes through clenched teeth.

Her hand comes out of her pocket, and she’s holding a gun. She brings it up, pointing it at him.

Her hand is shaking. She is possessed. Empty.

Those around them start screaming, running away. It doesn’t seem to phase her. She’s locked on him. She is here for him. He can see it.

He thinks of Holly.

“Claire…” Nick says. He puts his hands up and takes one step towards her.

“Don’t.” She clicks the safety off.

“I’ve lost everything. Because of you.”

He sees her hand twitch.

He sees Luke lunge at her, knock her, and in the same moment, the shot rings out.

*****

I hear screams first. Then people dashing towards us.

A few seconds later, a gunshot. More shouting. _Shit. Nick. Luke._

I glance at Rita, and we both run in the direction it’s coming from.

“Call 911!” I hear someone yell.

I will never forget what I see as I come round the far aisle.

Luke and a couple of others have a woman pinned to the ground. She’s crying hysterically.

There’s a gun on the floor next to them.

And across from the gun, Nick is lying there. The floor around him is red. He’s bleeding.

_Oh my God._ It’s him. He’s been shot.

_No._

I run over and fall down next to him.

“Nick!”

They’re not like what you see in the movies, these big moments. The scene isn’t playing in slow motion. He’s in front of me, struggling to breathe, and I watch as the colour floods out of him. I can hear his sharp, shallow breaths. His face is white, so white, drained of everything and his eyes are wide with pain and fear.

I’ve seen enough death for a lifetime. _But not him. Please, not him. Just let me have this one thing._

Someone has their hand on his side, trying to stop the bleeding.

“Let me,” I say to them. I place my right hand where theirs is, pressing down. As we swap, blood covers my hand. _Fuck._

There’s too much of it.

“June,” Nick gets out, gasping. “I’m sorry.”

I can feel him shaking. He’s going in to shock.

“What are you sorry for?” I shake my head.

Those dark brown eyes stare up at me. “Everything.”

He winces and then gasps again, his breathing laboured.

I can’t bear to see him like this. _What the fuck is happening?_

_Please, God, say this is a nightmare. Please, just wake me up. Don’t let him die here. Not like this._

I pull him onto my lap with my free hand, shifting my knees under him and cradling his head in my left arm.

“Sssh… it’s okay… it’s gonna be okay…”

“No… it’s not…” he says. His speech is slurring.

_“He killed them!”_ the woman pinned to the floor cries. She sounds far away. Probably the blood pounding in my ears.

I don’t look at her. My focus is only on him, taking in every part of him, as his eyelids begin to droop.

“Nick, stay with me.” I shake him. He has to stay with me.

His eyes snap open.

“Sorry,” he says. He’s trying. He’s fighting it.

“It’s okay. It’s okay.”

I watch, helpless, as he starts to slip away somewhere I can’t follow. I try to keep him here with me, but his mind is turning inward. His eyes are glazing over.

He tries to speak again.

“Tell…Holl…“

But his eyes fall shut and his head lolls in to my arm as he passes out. Whatever it was he wanted to say, he didn’t get to say it.

“Nick… _Nick_!”

_I can’t lose you, do you hear me?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry. I have been extremely nervous to post this. Next chapter is finished and will be up soon.


	6. Chapter 6

Sirens. Blue lights. Uniforms. An oxygen mask. Hurried voices.

I’m hardly aware of any of it.

I go with Nick in the ambulance, but I can’t touch him. The paramedic is too busy.

At the hospital, he is wheeled away, in a blur, and I am left standing, alone, in the corridor.

I try to silence the thought it might be the last time I ever see him

I’ve had that thought before. To feel it again chills me to the bone. I thought we were free from that now.

A nurse calls to me as the doors swing closed. I only hear her distantly, she could be miles away. The room is spinning. I can feel myself zoning out. I can feel the blackness creeping in around the edges of my vision, trying to swallow me down, threatening to drown me. I feel like I’m on the edge of a cliff, staring down at darkness below. Standing on a knife edge. Trying not to fall.

_Stay alive, Nick. You’d better fucking stay alive. Don’t you dare. Stay with me._

Bile rises up in my throat, and I clamp my mouth shut with my hand, forcing it back down, steadying myself on the wall with my hand.

The nurse, calling to me again, louder this time, brings me back in to the room.

“Are you his next of kin?”

I shake my head, lost. “What?”

“Are you family?”

_Yes_ , I want to scream.

I purse my lips and close my eyes, taking a couple of deep breaths.

“Ma’am? Are you okay?”

“He’s the father of my daughter.”

The weight of this, as I say it, is not lost on her. She looks sympathetically at me, and nods. That seems to be enough.

“Is there anyone else we can contact for him? Other family?”

“I don’t know, I…” I trail off into silence, blinking at her. I don’t know.

His mother is gone, I know that. He told me one night at the Globe. I’m not sure about his father. I assumed he was too, although I never asked.

He avoided talking about his brother.

“I don’t think he has anyone,” I admit to her quietly.

_—_

I get ushered into a waiting room.

When I wash my hands in the adjoining restroom, I try not to think about the red that colours the water, spiralling down the plughole, as I scrub them.

A police officer sits with me, so that I’m not on my own. I stare at the artificial flowers on the side table. Silvery and purple. They remind me of a funeral. Is that all this room is? Preparation for bad news? Steeling you for what you are about to go through?

After a few minutes, Rita and Luke stumble in to the room. They drove after us, in a cab.

“How is he?” Rita asks straight away.

I shake my head. “I don’t know. They took him in to surgery.”

I can hear the panic shaking my voice; I’m frantic. I haven’t felt this way in a long time. And the person who would always comfort me before is not here to do that right now. My foot taps on the floor and I stand up again.

“Have you called Moira? Told her what happened?” I ask Luke.

He shakes his head. “Not yet.”

“We need to tell her. I need to check she’s okay with the girls,” I fret, pacing, my mind catching on to this one thought and honing in on it, as it flounders. “They won’t know where you’ve got to—”

I reach into my bag for my phone, but my hand finds something else. Something soft and small. And I stop dead.

My hand comes up to my mouth.

“June? What is it?” I hear Rita say, as I pull it out.

They both stare at me in silence.

“Nick bought it," I whisper. "For Holly."

It’s the toy rabbit. The one he gave me this morning.

I’d forgotten to give it to her while he was there.

I don’t say any more. It’s too much. That’s when the tears come.

I don’t make it back to a chair. I sink to the ground, sobs taking me over, pulling me down as I clutch it to my chest. Rita wraps her arms around me as my legs go weak, and we kneel together on the floor.

Luke watches from the doorway, silent.

—

A few hours later, I’m sitting beside Nick in an empty hospital room.

The nurse turned the main light off; the room is almost dark. With only the side light on, it’s not too harsh. I’m thankful for the quiet.

Just the steady beeping of a monitor.

He survived. I’ve been with him since he got out of theatre, waiting. The nurse said he could wake up any time; it’s hard to know exactly.

He was shot in the abdomen. The worst thing was the blood loss, they told me. Once they’d stopped that, he started responding better. He’s stable.

They said he was lucky; it was close. An inch one way and the bullet could have hit a major artery. One more minute and he could have lost too much.

But he’s still here. He’s still with me.

_I just need to know he’s okay._

My eyes trail up from the tube in his arm…along a line of red, up to the bag of blood on his IV pole. He’s getting a transfusion. Four units for now, I heard them say. Maybe more later.

I’m pulled from my thoughts as I catch him moving out of the corner of my eye; stirring. I lean forward and grab his hand.

Slowly, his eyelids flutter open. He frowns.

“Nick?”

He doesn’t react. He’s still coming to.

I stand up and dash out in to the corridor. “He’s waking up!” I call to a nurse at the desk, before rushing back inside, skirting around the policeman who is standing guard at the door to his room, for security.

When I re-enter, Nick already looks a little more alert. He is blinking, eyes taking in the room, confused.

My hand finds his arm again.

After a moment, the doctor walks in and stands by his bedside, opposite me.

“It’s okay, Nick,” she says, putting her hand on the bed rail, watching him carefully. “You’re okay. Do you remember what happened?”

He focuses on her and I see his breathing getting quicker, chest rising and falling faster. The night is coming back to him.

I squeeze his arm a little tighter.

“Yeah,” he rasps, eventually, and then tries to swallow. “Where am I?” His throat sounds dry, but it’s a relief to hear his voice.

“You’re at Toronto Western Hospital,” the doctor explains as she continues to look at his readings.

Suddenly he brings his hand up towards his side, reaching for where he was shot. His face twitches in pain, as if the memory brought it back. Then he sees the canular in his arm and follows it up, as I had done minutes earlier.

“What happened?” he breathes, his voice low.

“Are you happy for Ms Osborne to stay here while we go over everything?”

He finally looks at me, finally processing that I’m there with him.

His expression softens.

“Hi,” I say nervously.

“You okay?” he asks me, his voice so soft that I barely hear him. I know I look a mess. I am beyond drained.

Still… _What the fuck, Nick? Am_ I _okay?_

I try to smile a little. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

I am anything but fine. But he’s alive, and he’s talking, so that’s something. I’ll hold on to that.

The doctor glances between us, and then says, kindly: “Everything looks good. You’re doing well. Why don’t you take a few minutes, and then I’ll come back and talk over it all?”

Nick nods silently.

“How is your pain level? Do you want me to up your meds?”

“I’m fine,” he says simply, but I can see he looks uncomfortable. His breathing is shallow.

“Are you sure?” I say. He wouldn’t let on.

“Yeah.”

As the doctor walks out, Nick lets his head sink back in to the pillow. He stares at the ceiling for a few seconds, thinking, and then closes his eyes, sighing heavily.

I don’t think he thought he would wake up.

—

The next few days all blur into one, but Nick does well. Physically.

I spend most of my time at the hospital, in his room, except for a few hours seeing Hannah and Holly. Luke looks after them the rest of the time, for now, giving me space. I’m grateful.

Nick sleeps a lot, but that’s normal, the nurses tell me. His body is recovering.

And when he sleeps, I watch him, just like I used to, before we always had to part. Recommitting the image to memory. The line of his jaw. The tone of his skin. The colour of his hair. He always looked so peaceful when he slept.

There are moments when the relief is so much, I feel like I’m going to pass out. Others when I freeze and all I can see in my head is him closing his eyes as he lay in my arms on the shop floor. I remember the fear that paralyzed me, like being covered in ice cold water. My chest tightened, the air drawn out of my lungs.

What’s that expression? _You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone._ Or, _almost gone_ , in my case.

That’s how I feel. But I don’t know what it is that we have. I thought I did. I thought I knew where we were heading. But it’s fading again.

The hardest part is that, when he _is_ awake, Nick barely speaks. The warmness we had before, on the day of the surrender, has gone, replaced by another wall. He’s closed off again—distant, haunted by something; I can tell. I try and get him to talk, to get whatever thoughts he has out of his head and into the space between us. But it never works.

“You don’t have to stay here, you know,” he says, one day. “I’ll be okay.”

I look up from the book I’m reading. He was so quiet, I didn’t even realise he was awake.

He sounds resigned. Like he’s waiting for the inevitable.

I frown, reaching for his hand and clasping it in mine.

“I want to be here, Nick.”

He blinks, looking down at our hands, and then shifts, pulling his away gently. He turns to face the window. It’s gray outside.

I asked yesterday if he wanted me to bring Holly to see him. I thought it might raise his spirits. But he said no. I hope it’s just that he’s worried the hospital will scare her. Or that he doesn’t want the reporters camped outside—the ones I’ve told him about—to see her. But maybe there’s another reason, something else holding him back. I don’t know.

He doesn’t tell me anything. He never fucking talks.

But I’ll wait.

“ _Nick_.” The force in my tone turns his face back to me.

I take his hand back in mine, not letting him go, and I run my thumb over the back of it, trying to reassure him.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I say, shaking my head.

He stares at me. His eyes betray the hard front he is putting on. I see them soften, sad, full of pain.

But he sets his jaw again and looks away.

He doesn’t believe me. Yet.

—

There’s only one thing Nick has told me about what happened; one thing he made sure I knew.

So, one evening after leaving him at the hospital, I find myself knocking on the door to Moira’s apartment, to see Luke.

He opens it and starts when he sees me.

“Where are the girls?” he asks after a beat.

I’ve never been there, since he moved out, without the premise of picking up them up or dropping them off for some reason.

“Moira is still with them. I wanted to talk to you. Can I come in?”

He looks at me calmly, if a little surprised.

“Sure.”

We walk in to the living room.

“How’s Nick?” Luke asks.

Nick is the reason I am here. “Okay. He’s doing well.”

He nods, and waits for me to speak.

I swallow.

“He said that you saved him?”

At that, Luke looks up at me, but doesn’t respond.

“Do you want a drink?” he says, avoiding the question and walking to the kitchen counter.

“Luke.”

“I didn’t save him,” he says, scoffing, shaking his head, like the idea is ridiculous. But Nick wouldn’t have lied.

“He said that you pushed her. The woman who shot him. Knocked her.”

He puts the glass on the table in silence and I listen as he pours water into it. When he’s done, he stalks back over to me. I continue.

“If you hadn’t done that, she might have hit his chest. His heart, or his lung, or… or…” My chin starts trembling and I try to stave my emotions off.

“Sssh,” he says. “Come on.” And he pulls me into him.

I sniff a couple of times and manage to swallow down my tears. I don’t want to cry in front of him. But I’m still dealing with the scene at the store. I’m still dealing with what could have happened. And it seems inevitable—what _would_ have happened—if Luke hadn’t been there. It was point blank range.

“Thank you,” I whisper into his chest.

A long moment passes.

“He’s Holly’s father,” he states simply.

My face crumples, and I look up at him. His eyes are shining; wet.

That’s why he did it. For her.

“So are you,” I breathe, willing him to hear me. Because he is. Family is more than blood. Holly _loves_ him. Him and Moira, they raised her, cared for her when we couldn’t. And they still do.

He sighs.

“I love you,” I say. I need him to hear it. Even if it’s the last time.

“I know. I love you too.” He smiles, lighter though, as if he has finally let go. “Always. But you don’t look at me that way anymore. Not the way you look at him.”

He’s waiting for me to get to the same page. This is the end.

With that, my resolve collapses and I start to cry in earnest. I didn’t expect this from him; this kindness. This admission. I thought he was too proud.

“You deserve to be happy, June.”

Luke wraps his arms around me, and I sink into his chest. Frankly, I’m amazed I still have any tears left to cry, after the last few days and weeks. But I’m learning that it’s better that I feel it all. That I let it fall over me and wash away the pain, better than keeping it all inside, numb, like I had been before. It’s hard, but it is the only way I can move forward. There’s nothing to fear from showing emotion, no role I need to play and no Wall they can hang me from now, if I don’t. It is not a weakness to be vulnerable.

When we finally pull apart, Luke looks like he wants to say more, but he’s scared to.

“What is it?”

“Promise me… that whatever happens, I can still see her?”

“Of course,” I say, wiping my eyes with the back of my hand. “Of course.”

“ _Always_.”


	7. Chapter 7

“A few more days, and I think you’ll be able to go home,” the doctor says, smiling, looking up from her clipboard.

Nick sighs, nodding gratefully. I see him gripping the bed rail, to disguise his discomfort, as I help him climb back in to bed. He moves with some effort, seeming almost out of breath.

The doctor has finished her assessment.It’s been sixteen days and he is over the worst now. They’ve monitored him closely, for any sign of infection, but his progress has been steady and he’s recovering well. He had his stitches out two days ago, although I wasn’t there for that, and now, what’s left is just to heal.

“You’ll need to take it easy, and see a doctor twice a week to check your dressing.”

“Okay.”

She explains to him a little more about getting discharged and the aftercare involved, and after a couple more minutes, once she has disappeared out the door, I turn to him.

“That’s good. You’re getting out finally.”

“Yeah,” he tries to smile, but it looks forced.

He’s been deep in his thoughts all morning. Quieter, even than usual.I keep catching him staring at me, mulling something over. Like he’s working up to a difficult thought.

“Do you want anything from the cafeteria? I’m gonna get a coffee.”

He shakes his head, and I go to leave, frustrated that some days, like today, just when I think he’s starting to come back out of his shell, he moves back in on himself. I know that recovery is anything but a straight line. But I just wish I could do more to help him. I know he would do the same for me. I haven’t always been there for him, when he’s needed me. I can’t change the past. All I can do is be here now.

Then, as I reach the door, he finally speaks up.

“June?”

I turn on the spot. “Yeah?”

“I need you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“Claire. The woman at the store...”

My breath catches. The woman at the store who _shot him_ , he means.

“What about her?”

What he says next makes my stomach drop.

“I need you to visit her.”

—

Metal and concrete.

The prison reminds me of Gilead.

A guard leads me into the visiting room with a few others, and motions me to a phone booth. The seat is hard and cold, like everything else here.

I hear a door on the other side of the glass open, and a few seconds later, Claire comes into view. She glances up at me and then straight back down. Keeping herself detached.

She sits down, and I remember the last time I saw her face, screaming, with Nick lying next to her. I shut my eyes to try and block the memory; it won’t help me here and now. I focus on taking a few deep breaths, slow, in and out, as I try and gather my thoughts.

I reach for the phone to speak, my hand trembling. She picks up the receiver just after I do.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“My name is June. June Osborne.”

“Yeah. I know who you are,” she says, emotionless. Blank.

I rang the prison a couple of days ago, after I got home from seeing Nick. She had to agree to the visit.

As I stare down at the table, I can’t shake the look she had, as Luke pinned her down. I only saw her for a second, before I focused all my attention on Nick, but I can still see it now, as if I am back there. Flashes of moments I can’t forget, like a nightmare that refuses to fade.

“I was a Handmaid too,” I say, to fill the silence, through the glass.

“Yeah. I know,” she replies, her voice tinny through the phone line.

She looks dead inside. Shut off from everything. Without hope.

There’s no point in dancing around the subject. It won’t serve either of us.

“Nick wanted me to come and see you.”

Her brow furrows for a second, abandoning her cold front. She doesn’t understand. I don’t blame her, really; I hardly do either.

She sniffs. “Why?”

I roll the words around in my tongue. It takes some effort to get them out. I will do it, though. For him.

“He wanted me to tell you that he’s sorry. That he doesn’t blame you.”

I swallow. “He forgives you.”

She stops dead, paralysed, and I watch her as she takes what I said in. Her face a picture of conflict.

I imagine what she’s thinking.

Wondering what kind of man that makes him, if he _could_ forgive her, and wants her to know it.

Wondering if a man like that is one she should have found to blame.

Wondering if the doubt in her mind, for what she did, is right.

First, her lips begin to quiver. She presses them together, to try and stop it, but then a guttural sob escapes them and she drops her head into her free hand.

When she lifts back up, the mask is gone and I can finally see her for who she really is. It didn’t take much for her facade to crumble—just a little bit of humanity. I see her pain, her loss, and her disgust. That she did this. That they turned her into this.

Any remaining hesitance I feel towards her dissipates. It wasn’t her. It was Gilead that did this. I know the anger she feels—the sense of injustice—because I have felt it too, coursing through my veins like fire. Threatening to break me. Those last months, before Boston was liberated, and Nick was in Chicago, were the worst. It was too much to bear alone. I almost lost myself.

I put my hand to the pane between us. She does too. The glass reflects my hand into her own; a mirror image.

“He’s a good man,” I say. I can’t leave without telling her that. I need her to know it. For myself.

She tries to catch her breath as she cries.

“I’m sorry,” she gasps, weak. “Your daughter. I know he’s her father.”

“I’m sorry for what I did,” she gets out shakily, tears running freely. I blink back my own.

“It’s okay,” I say. “He’s gonna be okay.”

I continue, “You’ll get out of here, eventually.”

“And when you do, it’s gonna be a better world.”

—

The next day, Nick comes home with me. I insist, and he doesn’t really have a choice; the doctors wouldn’t let him go home to an empty apartment. He needs support.

The hospital lets us use a back exit so that we go unnoticed from any journalists still wanting a story, although most of them have given up by now; I have avoided them every day. The ride home is comfortable. I can tell he’s relieved to finally be leaving, and my report of meeting Claire yesterday seems to have taken a weight off his shoulders. We sit quietly in the back, both resting inside our own thoughts. I remember the last time we shared a cab together, that dark, early morning after the night before. I was so confused then. Things are a little clearer for me, now.

I look across at Nick. He’s staring at the city passing him by outside the car, as dusk falls. It must still feel new to him; this world of freedom. He keeps so much of himself to himself, and he only had a few weeks out of prison before he was shut up in a hospital again. Today is like a second release.

At a traffic stop, I look past his silhouette and out the window. A couple is standing, kissing, outside a coffee shop. Her hair is long and blonde; she’s wearing a red winter coat. He has one arm wrapped round her, sheltering her from the cold with his black trench coat. His other hand is at her face, cupping it up towards him. They are lost in each other.

Nick glances sideways at me, and I turn away, but too late; he has seen me watching them. I sense his gaze on me as I look out the other window. I know he felt the same thing.

They look like us.

It was a dream then. It wasn’t possible.

_Is it possible now?_

—

When we walk into the apartment, I hear laughter and the buzz of kids' TV in the background. I asked Moira to watch Holly while I picked Nick up. They are singing songs together.

Moira looks up as I stick my head through the door and smile at them.

“Hey,” she says.

“Hey.”

She looks past me at Nick, who hangs back, and stands up, brushing herself down. I’ve told Nick all about her, over the years, and more in the last few days. Moira and I have spoken about him, too, since he's been in the hospital.

“Hi,” she says, almost nervously.

“Hi,” he replies quietly, giving a little nod.

Moira glances between Holly and Nick.

“Fuck. You look even more like her than I thought,” she blurts, without thinking.

There’s silence for a second, as we take in what she has said, and then I let out a shocked laugh. Her eyes widen, as she realises that, in one moment, she has both sworn in front of Holly—a constant battle with her—and, straight away, brought up the elephant in the room.

She swallows at me. “Sorry.”

Still smiling, I shake my head at her. I don’t know what I expected. I half thought she would be cold with him, defensive. But she knows what he meant to me in Gilead. She knows that he helped me to survive. I guess the fact that she knows he was there for me, when she couldn’t be, is enough for her. And, of course, she knows about Chicago, too.

I turn to Nick, who’s frozen on the spot, lips slightly apart, completely lost for how to respond, and then I’m distracted by Holly climbing up my leg to greet me.

“Hey, baby girl.” I crouch down and hoist her up on to my hip.

Following Holly’s eyes, I turn my head to look at Nick. I see him take in the rabbit Holly has in her hand; his gift, the one that has barely left her side since I gave it to her. His eyes sparkle, and he smiles a small, knowing, genuine smile; the first real smile I’ve seen in days. It makes my heart warm.

“Hey,” he whispers softly to Holly. She rests her head on my shoulder, sucking her thumb, taking him in, content in my arms.

Moira breaks the moment with a cough.

“I’ll let you guys get settled. I think Luke’s got dinner waiting for us anyway. Tikka masala. Again,” she rolls her eyes.

Hannah is already with Luke. She’s staying with Moira and him tonight, and probably for the next couple of days. They’re only a couple of apartment blocks away; it’s just a few minutes’ walk. Moira doesn’t have much space in her one-bed, but when Hannah stays she sleeps with her in her bed, while Luke sleeps on the couch. They’ve done it a few times now, especially while I have been at the hospital so much. Luke likes having her stay over, and it’s fun for Hannah too. I’m grateful to both of them for looking after her so much.

After Moira has left, having told me that Holly has had some food already, I call for takeout; pizza, something easy. We watch some TV as we eat, just like we’ve been doing at the hospital, to fill the time, sitting at opposite ends of the sofa. Halfway through the night, I get down on the floor and play with Holly on the floor, who is puzzling over a wooden block game, and Nick watches us from the couch.

I can’t bring myself to put Holly to bed at her normal time, but, sooner than I expect, I feel as exhausted as Nick looks.

Turning the TV off, I climb back on the couch and sit next to him, closer this time.

“You sure you’re alright on the couch?”

It feels wrong, but he was adamant he wanted to sleep in here, and I didn’t put up a fight, incase he refused to come back with me.

Nick nods.

We settle in to silence.

“Home sweet home,” I whisper to myself, shaking my head.

“June,” he breathes, frowning. “Thank you. I’ve had a good night. I-”

He shifts and then winces suddenly, looking down at his side, reminded of his injury. He’s been sat in the same position all night. Maybe he even forgot, briefly. A darkness crosses his face and his jaw stiffens.

I reach out to him, touch my fingers lightly to his; trying to offer some comfort. I know there is still a war going on in his head. His fingers twitch away and then freeze, suspended. He holds them there, thinking about how to respond. Eventually, his hard exterior breaks and his hand circles round mine and squeezes. Something, at last. Our eyes meet.

I smile at him.

Holly crawls over to us, interrupting, and pulls herself up to standing, using Nick’s leg.

I gather myself.

“Right, sweetie, it’s way past bedtime for you too. You wanna pick a story?” I say, pointing to the bottom shelf of the bookcase across the room, where we keep the children’s books.

She crawls over to them and quickly chooses one.

I take the book from her, and then I look at Nick, who’s attention is back on her. An idea comes to me.

“Do you want to read it to her while I sort their room?”

His mouth falls open a little, betraying him, before he clamps it shut and swallows. His eyes widen. I know it means a lot.

He doesn’t speak—I’m not sure he can—but he nods.

I hold the book out to him and he takes it, resting it on to his lap.

“Holly, is it ok if Nick reads you a story tonight?”

“‘Kay,” she answers. He smiles nervously.

She climbs up on to the couch and settles next to him. He watches her in awe as she wriggles in to him (his good side), totally comfortable this time, not like when he held her all those weeks ago; just preoccupied with the idea of being read to. She loves story time.

He tentatively lifts his arm and envelopes it round her, so that she can press into him, and she pushes the book open impatiently.

Nick fingers the first page, reading the title to himself.

“Do you like this one?” he asks her gently.

She looks up at him and nods, bright eyes staring into his. Then she puts her thumb in her mouth and rests her head on his stomach.

He smiles warmly down at her. My heart swells.

Nick clears his throat and starts to read.

_“Little Nutbrown Hare, who was going to bed, held on tight to Big Nutbrown Hare’s very long ears.”_

He turns the page.

_“He wanted to be sure that Big Nutbrown Hare was listening.”_

I pull myself away from them towards the girls’ room, forcing myself to go and sort out the laundry I should have put away this morning.

_“Guess how much I love you,” he said..._ ”

As I’m folding Holly and Hannah’s clothes, Nick’s story is my background noise. His voice is calming, low and soft, like a ribbon of velvet. As he reads a little more, I hear him getting more confident. He starts changing his voice slightly for each of the two characters. When Nick says _“I love you all the way up to my toes!”,_ Holly lets out a comfortable little laugh.

But, after a few minutes of tidying, I realise that it’s gone quiet.

When I enter the living room again, to check on them, I see Holly, fast asleep, with her head on Nick’s side, her tiny hand curled on him. The book is closed, laying on the seat next to them. And Nick is asleep, too, his head resting back on the couch, but turned down towards her, like he was watching her before he fell asleep. His mouth is curved into another soft smile. They look so peaceful together.

I file the book away, and sit and watch them.

There are moments in life you want to mark forever, to pinpoint and to keep safe in your heart. This is one of them, for me. I feel like I could stare at them like this for the rest of my life. It feels perfect. It’s then that I realise that this moment, here, right now, is all I want. I hate that it took me almost losing him forever to know it. The three of us, in this room, safe and together. Hannah could be asleep in the next room. If she was, I would be complete.

After about ten minutes, Holly moves in her sleep, and it causes Nick to stir.

He blinks his eyes open, and looks around, gaze falling on me. Then he looks down at Holly, and remembers. He can’t help but smile.

“I’ll take her,” I whisper to him.

I walk over and pull her up into my arms, gently. Nick shuffles, moving position. I see him clench his jaw as he grabs a pillow and blanket from the floor.

“Are you sure you’re okay out here?”

“Yeah,” he smiles, looking up at me softly. “I’m fine. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight,” I whisper.

I sleep better that night than I have in a long time.

But the bed still feels empty.

—

We stay at home together, just the three of us, all day the next day. I want Nick to feel settled in at my place, and I don’t want to leave him on his own. So I stay.

Nick takes a nap for a couple of hours in the afternoon. When he’s awake, he barely takes his eyes off Holly, still dazed from the moments they shared last night. Eager to learn more about his daughter with every passing minute. He can’t be as active with her as he’d like, because of his injury. He is still quiet, still nervous, still a little awkward, but he seems content just to watch me with her. Just being with her is enough.

In the evening, Rita comes round to welcome Nick home, and she brings us some dinner to heat. She hugs us both warmly when she arrives, and the atmosphere is comfortable as we eat—Holly keeps everyone entertained—but all through the meal, I can tell something is playing on her mind. A sadness in her eyes gives her away. She’s withdrawn.

When she leaves after dinner, we catch a moment alone together in the hall. I glance back at Nick, who’s clearing the dishes from the table.

“You okay?” Rita asks me.

“Yeah,” I nod. “He’s just so quiet, I don’t know how he’s doing, I—“

“Yeah. Well. That’s Nick for you. Some things don’t change,” she says, matter-of-factly.

Something is off with her. Something is wrong.

“What about you?” I offer.

“I’m fine,” she says, straight away, out of habit. A knee-jerk reaction. But she pauses. Quickly shaking her head at her own lie. She swallows, a shadow falling over her.

“I’m going to Alaska in a few days with Camila. Anchorage. There’s a memorial there. For the soldiers who died in the War.”

I sense there’s more, and I give her space to continue.

“My son. Matthew. It’s where he’s buried.”

I feel the breath knocked out of me. _Her son?_ I look at her, reeling, confused.

“He died in the War… He was in the Army. Before.”

Our eyes meet as a wave of shock shivers over me. My hand reaches behind me for the bedroom doorframe, to steady myself.

I never knew about him. The Marthas were normally women without children, so I’d always assumed…

“Rita, I…”

It’s then that we both turn and realise Nick is standing in the doorway.

He’s staring at Rita. He heard what she said. His eyes falls to the ground as he blinks, frowning, taking it in.

She looks at him for a second, thinking, and then her eyes come to focus on a spot on the wall behind me, across from the door.

“They turned the US army in on itself. Gilead forced half of the soldiers in to service, and the rest tried to stop the coup. Most of them died. Matthew was in Washington.”

“He would have been twenty-six next week.”

The three of us stand in silence, Nick and I absorbing this revelation, this piece of Rita that we never knew.

“ _Blessed by they that mourn. For they shall be comforted_ ,” she scoffs, wiping away a tear as it trails down her cheek. “That’s what she said to me. Serena. What the fuck did she know about loss?”

”What blessings did I ever get?” she asks, under her breath.

I place my hand on her arm. “I’m sorry.”

Rita sniffs, nodding at my gesture. “I just need to see him, you know? To be with him.”

I try to find words to comfort her, but what can I possibly say? No parent should have to visit their child’s grave.

_So many lives wasted._

She sighs, picking her bag off the floor, collecting herself.

“I’ll leave you guys to it. Have a good night.”

She turns to Nick again, and waits for him to look at her. He pulls his dark gaze up, brow still furrowed deeply. Guilty.

But there is no hint of blame in Rita’s eyes.

“I’m glad you’re home,” she says to him, sincerely. "I'll see you soon."

She wipes her face again quickly and then makes for the door, nodding at me, before she opens it and steps out in to the hall.

—

After Rita has left, we watch more TV together as Holly plays at our feet. At first, a heavy tension hangs over us, and Nick is silent, lost deep in his head again, but the jokes on the screen take the edge off, and slowly relax him a little. Tonight, it’s a rerun of _FRIENDS_. We have both seen this episode before; we watched it together, at the Globe, from a DVD I found on an abandoned desk.

It’s the only time in Gilead my mind doesn’t mind being taken back to. Our sliver of normal life. Our little bubble.

After the show finishes, Nick reads Holly another bedtime story, and she takes a little while to go down after with me. When I finally walk back in to the living room, I stand and watch him in the doorway, once again wincing as he leans over the couch, trying to arrange the sofa cushions into a makeshift bed for another night.

He shouldn’t be doing this. He shouldn’t be sleeping on the couch.

“Will you just come to bed?” I let slip, before I have a chance to think.

He freezes and turns to look at me warily.

The air between us seems to stand still.

“It’s not like anything’s going to happen,” I add softly, reassuring him. It can't. He’s still recovering.

He stares at me, gulping, and then nods silently, giving in.

“Okay.”

I sigh, relieved by every little step of progress. “Okay.”

I turn and walk into the bedroom. He follows, shutting the door, and as it clicks behind him, the mood switches.

He begins to shuffle and kick his sweatpants off, and I unbuckle my pants in silence. We steal wordless glances at each other. Even though I tried to brush it off, to make him sleeping in here with me seem like nothing, the energy between us quickly becomes loaded.

I sit down on my side of the bed with my back to him, and he eases himself down on to the other side, pulling the duvet up to his waist. Before I lie down, I unhook my bra and pull it out from under my top. I feel him trying not to watch as I slide my pants down my legs. When I turn towards him to climb under the sheets, our eyes catch.

I feel like I could write a book just about the way he looks at me, sometimes, with yearning eyes. His stare makes me blush.

Nick looks down, caught, chastising himself. A smirk creeps on to my lips, more heat rising in my cheeks.

We both settle down on to the pillows, but it’s not long before our eyes lock again and I start to hear my heartbeat rising in my ears, pounding. I want to reach out and touch him. I want to do more than that. I want to let him know him how badly I still want him. How much I miss him.

As he watches me, I imagine his fingers trailing up my arm. A thumb caressing my cheek. My mind is drawn back to a memory. His breath in my ear. Hands gripping my back. My fingers in his hair. I long for that connection again.

But he doesn’t touch me. These are his boundaries, and I want to respect them. There is a reason he wanted to sleep on the couch; something in his head is still holding him back. I don’t want to break his trust.

I reach for the lamp, to turn it off.

“Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, June,” he whispers, low, in the dark.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Carol for her advice on the first scene of this chapter!


	8. Chapter 8

I wake up feeling safe.

Slowly, I blink my eyes open to the light streaming through the curtains, and remember who’s next to me. My body had curled in to Nick as I slept, giving me away. As I rouse, he turns his face down to look at me, already awake. His arm is wrapped round me. He smiles briefly, and then turns, looking up in to space, lost in thought.

“Morning.”

“Good morning,” I smile, yawning.

I don’t move, because if I move, it might break the moment and we might think too much about what we’re doing. I don’t want that. He smells of sleep, and, somehow, warmth. Like home.

So I lie there, eyes closed, as his chest rises and falls under my hand. Willing this moment to stretch on forever.

But Nick breaks the silence.

“They told us it was for our protection at first. When they gave us the guns,” he states quietly. Matter of fact. Like he’s been working up to this all night.

I am snapped out of my reverie. I lift my head off the bed to look at him. He’s staring straight at the ceiling.

“What?”

“In the Crusade.”

My blood runs cold.

_Fuck._

I wait for him to continue. Promising myself that, whatever it is that he is finally ready to share, I will sit here, in silence, as long as it takes for him to get it out. However long he needs. I will listen.

“Once I realised what was happening, I thought…” he swallows, shaking his head. “I thought we would be stopped. I never thought it would all go ahead, the way it did. It didn’t seem real.“

“I wanted to leave. Tell them that I didn’t want to be part of it any more. But the people that did that, they went missing. _Deserters of the Cause_ , they called them. They made them disappear.”

A shiver runs down my spine. I feel the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.

He blinks rapidly. “I should have done more. It’s so obvious now. But I was scared. I was weak. I had nothing. Nothing that mattered…”

The pain in his voice is chilling. I shake my head a little, not sure I want to hear the rest. But this is what I’ve been waiting for. Answers. Talking. I recognise that the reason he is telling me is because he needs to get it out.

“I never wanted to kill anyone.”

I don’t know what to say to that. The silence stretches out. Nick still doesn’t dare to look at me.

“But it happened. We didn’t get stopped. And I was in the middle of it.”

“I tried to keep my head down. But then the security started shooting. At us.” He closes his eyes briefly, reliving it. ”At me.” His voice falters and cracks. He doesn’t look at me as he speaks. His face is white.

“And I didn’t want to die. So I shot back” he chokes out. He sounds so young. Tears spill out over the corner of his eye, trailing in a straight line, down, below his temples, and on to the pillow.

“When the fighting ended. When it was over…” he continues, his throat thick with tears. “I didn’t know who I was any more. And I didn’t want them to let me go. I didn’t deserve it.”

And in his eyes, I see every soldier—every young man—that’s ever been drawn in to a cause he didn’t understand. Lured in, to fight for a better world, or so he thought. Phoney. A lie.

“The ones who give the orders,” he says. “They’re not the ones who die. They’re not the ones who look into someone’s eyes—someone who looks _just like them_ \- and pull the trigger.”

He sighs, shaking his head. “Rita’s son…” he trails off, clenching his eyes shut, full of regret.

He runs his hand over his face, trying to keep his emotions together so that he can finish.

“The Handmaid who shot me. Claire. She could have been you, June. She said her husband was killed. And her daughter was taken.”

He looks at me, and his chin trembles.

“It could have been _you._ It _was_ you _. And I did that_ , _”_ he gets out, before his resolve collapses.

“Nick… no…”

I fall into him as he breaks down, wrapping my arms around him tightly, and he pulls me in for dear life as he sobs into my neck. I cry with him.

“I’m so sorry,” he gasps.

Clutching at me, he cries so much that I worry about his scar, still healing.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. It’s not your fault,” I try to soothe him. “You didn’t know. I know that. It wasn’t you.”

I repeat these words back to him, over and over. I don’t know if he hears them—if he takes them in—but eventually, he has nothing left to cry.

We lie there, together, for as long as it takes for the pain to ease.

I’ve had a lot of time to think, about his past, sitting at the hospital in his room, watching him as he slept. What he’s told me is no worse than I imagined. I knew already he was part of the Crusade. But it’s one thing to hear about the horrors he was part of on the news, as you try not to listen, and another to watch as a man cries in front of you, traumatised, about what he’s seen and done.

In my mind, I’d come to understand that this was what had happened. But I wanted to hear it from him. He was trapped. I was too. We both did things we couldn’t escape from. I remember the Salvagings. Hangings. Stonings. Memories that still give me nightmares. But what choice did I have, if I wanted to live? When the alternative was death, or torture? And it was no different with him. He told me before that he had been desperate. He was exploited. I can imagine how persuasive they were, in selling him their lie. The same lies they told the Mexicans, the Canadians, even the Swiss, at one time or another. Whole governments taken in. What chance did one lonely man have against such cunning and evil?

People hear what they want to believe, especially when someone reaches a hand out, after they feel like the world has turned its back on them.

I stroke Nick’s hair until he falls asleep again. So vulnerable. So open. Finally, he trusted me with the truth. The darkest corners of his mind. I understand why he was holding back.

But the words are out there now, and they can’t hurt us any more.

And three more words, the ones neither of us have spoken for more than a year, they creep back in to my thoughts, and settle there.

I don’t say them. Not then. Not yet.

—

Nick sleeps all morning. When Holly wakes up, I pull myself out of bed, and I spend the morning with her. It’s nice to be able to focus just on her, but I’m anxious for him to wake up. To move forward from this. But I’m meant to be seeing Hannah for lunch.

I wait as long as I can, but Moira calls me to check I’m coming, and I’m just getting Holly’s shoes on to leave the apartment when Nick emerges, looking nervously at me. He looks drained.

“You okay?” I say.

“Yeah,” he grinds out, his voice sounding rough and raw.

“I was just going to meet Hannah and Moira for lunch…”

He blinks, still looking unsure, uncertain of what I’m feeling, but then he collects himself. “Of course.”

“I’ll take Holly with me, okay? So Hannah can see her?”

He gulps. “Yeah. Okay.”

I don’t want to leave him. The timing is bad. I thought he’d wake up earlier, or that he’d sleep through us being gone. I was going to leave him a note.

But I’m late, and I don’t want to let my daughter down. I haven’t seen her in two days. She can still get anxious if we are apart for too long.

“I’ll be back later,” I say quietly, squeezing his arm. He looks down, not meeting my gaze, and nods, pressing his lips together.

I feel his eyes on my back as I get Holly’s coat on and head out the door.

—

Half an hour later, the four of us are sitting in a little café just on the edge of Little America, eating lunch.

It’s somewhere we come often, just a couple of minutes’ walk from Moira’s place. Hannah seemed restless, Moira said, so it made sense to get out of the apartment to meet up. It’s Saturday. Luke is busy applying for a new apartment today; somewhere of his own, still near to all of us.

I ask Hannah about school, and what they all got up to last night and the night before, but she seems distracted.

Five minutes after the waitress brings the food to our table, we’ve finally wrangled Holly in to her highchair, only to watch her start throwing bits of her sandwich on the floor and try to eat her bib instead. I finally sit down to eat my own food, starving—I hadn’t eaten at all that morning. I was too busy processing what had happened.

I’m deep in thought, when Hannah finally decides to pipe up.

“Mommy?”

“Yes, sweetie?”

“You know that man you’ve been visiting at hospital? Nick? The one Daddy says went home with you?”

“…Yeah, baby? What about him?”

“Amber at school said he deserved to get shot.”

I almost choke on my coffee.

“ _What?_ ”

“She says that her mom said he did bad things. And that makes him bad.”

I look at Moira, who was helping Holly with her food, a look of horror in my eyes. Her face is a reflection of mine. Speechless.

“Why are you friends with him?” she asks sincerely. ”Why is he staying at our place?”

I wipe my mouth with a tissue.

“Sweetie, that’s not true, what Amber’s mom said. She shouldn’t have said that.”

Moira cuts in. “Did Amber’s mom use to be an Aunt?” she says sarcastically under her breath, to mask her shock. Looking at me pointedly.

_Deserved to get shot?!_

“But didn’t he do something bad?” Hannah asks again.

I stare down at her. She only sees things in black and white sometimes. I have Gilead to thank for that, too. Conditioning. She has been taught to toe the line. I need to work on that.

I take a minute to gather my thoughts, rolling the right words to work around this in my head.

“Hannah, Nick got caught up in something he didn’t understand. He was tricked.”

She blinks at me, her face unreadable.

“But … afterwards, he tried to fix it.”

My daughter doesn’t know this man. All she knows is he is the reason I haven’t been around as much in the last couple of weeks. I can understand why she’d want to find a reason to put a wedge between us.

But I want her to know him.

“Do you remember in Gilead, that day when I saw you at the summer house? In the snow?”

“Yeah,” she nods, sadly, toying with her food, I stroke her cheek. Trying to connect.

“Do you remember there was a man with me, when I came?”

She stops scraping at her plate, and frowns, remembering.

“Yeah?”

“That was Nick.”

Confused, she looks up.

“He was my friend. He helped me, when I was apart from you and Daddy. He risked his life to try and get me out.”

There is more that I could tell her, of course, about the two of us. More that I could try and explain, hoping she might understand. But it doesn’t seem like the right time, and I want her to meet Nick before any of that. I need to speak to Luke first, too. She’ll know the rest soon enough.

“And Hannah… he helped get us out of there. Do you remember a few months ago, when the soldiers came to your school, and took you back to Daddy?”

She nods.

“Nick helped those soldiers get to you. We might still be there now if it wasn’t for people like him.”

Hannah looks at me with wide eyes.

“Sweetie, not everyone is either ‘bad’ or ‘good’. What matters is that he tried his best to do the right thing. He fought for you, and me, and all of us. And he made a difference.”

That seems to help her understand. The confusion on her face disappears, giving way to something better. But she continues with her line of questioning.

“Why he is staying at our place?”

“He’s staying with us because he needs looking after, while he gets better. He doesn’t have anyone else to help him.”

She takes a mouthful of food and chews it over, staring in to space, taking my words in.

I think back to this morning, watching him break down. How much he’s kept inside.

“Banana, baby, everyone should have a family, shouldn’t they, hey? No one should have to be alone?”

Moira gives me a small, knowing smile, out of the corner of my eye.

“I think you’ll like him, once you get to know him. Would you like to meet him soon?”

Hannah swallows her food and nods. “Okay.”

It’s a start.

—

An hour later, when I click the door of the apartment open and edge inside, weighed down by my daughter in my arms, I hear the TV switch off instantly. Nick comes out into the hallway, taking in a sleeping Holly on my shoulder.

“Hi,” I whisper.

“Hey. How’s Hannah?” he asks sincerely.

“She’s good,” I nod. “She’s gonna come home tomorrow, I think… you can meet her…”

He sets his jaw, nodding and taking a step closer to me.

“Listen, June, I’ve been thinking. I should go home.”

I stare up at him, dumbfounded.

“What?”

”I don’t want you to feel like you can’t have your own space, with the girls… I’ll be fine.”

“No. Nick. You don’t have to go. That’s not what I meant…”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to say anything. I understand.” He won’t accept my answer. It wasn’t a question.

A thought chills me that he thinks that I am trying to distance myself, after this morning; after what he told me. Convinced that, by being honest, he has pushed me away. Maybe he thinks that’s why I went out earlier.

I knew I shouldn’t have gone. _How long will we keep going in these circles?_

“I need to put Holly down…” I edge past him, into the girls’ bedroom, shaking my head. Her head is so heavy on my shoulder. I lean forward, over her cot, easing her into my hands and kissing her cheek as I put her down. Nick edges in to the room behind me, placing his hand on the rail of the cot as I lay her down, but standing back a little. Fighting a war between his head and his heart.

_How can I make him understand?_

Holly stirs, the movement waking her up.

“Mama,” she murmurs, blinking her eyes open drowsily.

I run my finger along her little cheek.

“Dada?” she adds then, still looking at me, her voice curling up in pitch.

She’s asking about Luke; where he is. Nick coughs and shuffles on his feet, behind me.

That’s when an idea comes to me.

“Daddy loves you, okay? You’ll see him soon.”

I hear Nick sighing heavily—full of sadness—next to me. His knuckles pressed white on the cot, feeling like he shouldn’t be here; like an intruder. I keep staring down at her, but out of the corner my eye I see him move his hand away, and go to leave the room.

As soon as he does, though, I reach out and grab his hand before he can, and pull him back. My eyes still fixed on her, to keep her attention.

“But, Holly? Nick... Nick is your father.”

I hear his sharp intake of breath behind me, shocked, but I pull him closer, so that we are standing together, above her. He looks stunned.

“Nick is your daddy too, baby,” I repeat, affirming it.

I squeeze his hand.

“And he loves you very much.”

She doesn’t hear us, not really. She doesn’t understand, of course. She’s too young. But I’ve said it. And I will say it as many times as I need to, until she does understand. Until it becomes her normal. Until it is all she knows.

Holly blinks up at him, and, like a ray of sunshine, she smiles. A big, sleepy, full grin, and it fills my heart.

“Dada,” Holly says, only echoing back to me what I just said. Replaying the sound, still learning her words. But it’s perfect timing. She could be saying it to him.

Nick is so close to me that I can hear his breath in my ear, shaky and awe-struck.

“Hey, sweetie,” he says, sniffing, his voice thick and a wide smile crossing his face.

For a minute, they just stare at each other.

Then, as her eyes fall shut again, I lean down to her and pull her blanket over her, planting a kiss on her forehead with my hand.

“Goodnight, baby. Have a nice sleep.”

I lead Nick out of the room; it’s hard for him to tear himself away from the moment, but we have more to say. I switch off the light and he follows me in to the main room.

Nick pauses in the doorway, gathering himself, and I wait as he slowly walks toward me.

We stand opposite each other, a couple of feet apart, and he takes my hands in his.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he whispers, looking down at the floor. He is barely holding it together, his eyes filled with tears, full of emotion.

“Yes, I did.”

A million things flicker across his face in one instant. I know what he’s feeling, because I feel it too. Apprehension. Fear. Butterflies. But I’m sure now. He laces his fingers in mine slowly. I think he knows what I’m about to say; where this is going. But he doesn’t want to believe it. So scared to let those feelings in again.

I push down the lump in my throat, close my eyes, and, when I open them again, I look straight at him, raising my hand to his cheek and pulling his eyes up to meet mine. I summon up the courage to say the words I have denied for too long.

“I love you.”

His lips part, mouth dropping open slightly. He frowns. Not imagining that I could, still, after everything, all this time; not now that he’s told me about the Crusade. He didn’t expect anything. That much is clear.

But I know, from the look on his face, that when I say it, he believes me.

“June…”

He lifts his hand to my face, instinctively tucking a lock of hair behind my ear and brushing his palm against my cheek. He sighs, his breath shuddering and ragged. It’s too much.

I turn my face in towards his hand just slightly, and gently kiss it. A tear rolls down my cheek, wetting his palm.

He wipes it away with his thumb and presses his forehead to mine. Then he buries both hands in my hair, tilting my head up as he brings our lips together, kissing me gentle and slow. I let out a sigh, and raise up on my tiptoes, pressing in to him and wrapping my arms round his neck. My mouth exploring his, remembering. I close my eyes and sink in to it, my body full of him as I hear him moan softly at this release.

_Finally._

As we pull apart, I rest both my hands on the sides of his face, keeping him close, exactly where he is.

“I love you, Nick Blaine from Michigan.” I tease. He laughs at that, remembering, smiling against my mouth.

Then he lets out another heavy sigh, his eyelids fluttering, like he’s breathing out all the pain.

“Are you sure?”

Now, it’s my turn to laugh.

“What? Am I sure that I love you?” I beam, breaking out into an even wider smile.

His cheeks flush and he looks down, and then swallows, eyes finding mine, his expression more earnest. Needing confirmation.

“Are you sure this is what you want?”

We are inches apart. I kiss him again in response, trying to pour all the love I have into it. To make him understand. _Yes, I’m sure. Trust me._ I won’t be kept apart from him any longer. This man who has done so much for me, and never asked for anything in return. Who thinks he’s not worthy of love. I want to show him that he is. I want to share the good and the bad. I want to go through it all with him. As I kiss him harder, he responds. More urgent. I feel him give in to it, wanting those things too.

To be a real family. The wildest of his dreams coming in to focus.

After a minute, he breaks away briefly, breathless, overcome.

“I love you so much.”

As soon as the words are out of his mouth, he wraps his arms around my waist and pulls me back in.

This is the first time we have kissed without breaking any rules. It feels good. It feels right; but then, it always has.

I allow myself to be present in this moment—to savour it—and let it last.

We have all the time in the world.

This is the first day of the rest of our lives.

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who has supported and motivated with with this story! I hope you are happy with the ending.

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and feedback are so appreciated! Thanks for reading.


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